


When Love Must Die

by Woland



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Aziraphale Whump (Good Omens), Crowley Whump (Good Omens), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Protective Crowley (Good Omens), and they will sacrifice everything for one another, but I gotta whump them all first, this will have a happy ending I promise, those boys love each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2020-09-19 08:02:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20327785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woland/pseuds/Woland
Summary: The Apocalypse didn't happen. The angel and the demon can get on with their lives, enjoying each other's company without having to look over their shoulders. Their superiors have washed their hands off them and have left them alone....Right?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been struggling with a particularly long writer's block, and so this is my attempt to get back out there, shake off the old cobwebs, so to speak. Hopefully, you'll enjoy the result.

“Aziraphale!”

There’s no answer when Crowley pushes open the heavy wooden door, but he knows the angel is here, can feel his aura – warm and inviting – permeating the bookshop.

“Aziraphale!” he calls out again, stepping further into the shop. 

And that’s when he notices him – a familiar, if slightly disheveled, figure hunched over a stack of some ancient books with worn, tattered covers, examining each one in turn with careful, reverent intent. Crowley shakes his head lightly at the sight of his angel so completely, so utterly absorbed in his task. Smiles – a fond little twitch of his lips.

“New acquisitions?” Crowley can’t help a small chuckle that slips past his lips at the way the angel startles at his words, head snapping up, eyes wide with shock of surprise that rapidly morphs into relief and then pure, sparkling joy.

“Crowley!” (and Crowley’s heart all but melts at the undisguised affection that curls itself around the sound of his name as it leaves the angel’s lips). “What are you doing here, my dear boy?”

“Forgot already.” Crowley shakes his head again, amused. Clarifies at Aziraphale’s confused expression, “Our lunch date? At the Ritz?”

“Lunch?” Aziraphale’s eyebrows crinkle in confusion. “But that wasn’t until 2 o’clock. I…”

“It’s 3:30 now, angel,” Crowley points out, thin lips twisting into an undemonically soft smile as he watches the angel fumble frantically for his pocket watch before glancing back at Crowley, flustered, eyes wide with remorse and alarm.

“Oh…,” he frets, hands fluttering nervously over his book-littered desk, as if he’s not sure where to put them. “Oh, no… Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear, it seems I completely lost track of time.”

“I can see that.” Crowley shakes his head fondly, nods at the stack of books by the angel’s hand. “New acquisitions?” And has to stifle a laugh at the way the angel’s whole demeanor changes at his question, the look of flustered embarrassment giving way to pure childlike excitement.

“Ah, yes!” Their lunch date seemingly forgotten once more, Aziraphale reaches excitedly for the topmost one – a particularly shabby-looking tome with a frayed-edge, faded cover, its pages looking a bit water-warped and yellowed with age. “This nice old lady stopped by earlier,” he explains, running his hand over the browned cover with the reverence of one handling one of the world’s most precious and rarest jewels. “Her husband had passed away recently, she said, and she was going through some of the boxes and found these and… Oh, Crowley…” The angel’s face lights up with the kind of exuberant, childlike radiance that seems to visibly brighten the space around him, and Crowley can’t help his own responding smile – a bit besotted, fond. “This here… it’s The Codex of Leicester! I know Leonardo da Vinci was technically one of yours, but this book, this… this _manuscript_… it’s one of a kind, Crowley… I didn’t think I would ever…”

“Well, go ahead then,” Crowley huffs indulgently, gesturing to the book, “open it.”

“You sure?” Aziraphale frets once more, hesitating. “What about our plans? I-“

“I’m sure, angel,” he confirms easily, and, oh, it is worth to miss a hundred lunch dates just to see the responding smile on his angel’s face. “Go on. The Ritz can wait.”

“Oh, thank you! Oh, my dear, thank you _so_ much!”

Aziraphale drops his gaze briefly down to the book in his hand before looking back up at Crowley with such gratitude, such open affection that Crowley feels something catch in his chest, stutter momentarily and then lurch into an unsteady, maddening beat. And all Crowley can do is give him a woodenly awkward nod, his mouth too dry, his tongue suddenly too heavy to obey even the simplest of commands.

Aziraphale, however, seems oblivious to his companion’s emotional tumult, all of his attention drawn once again to the book. He swallows with obvious trepidation, eyes alight with nervous excitement. Lovingly, slowly, pulls open the front cover.

“There’s a dedication page,” he hums, a slight frown creasing his forehead. “But… there’s some sort of … _smudge _on it, I can’t… can’t quite make out the name.” His fingers hover over the stain, fluttering in indecision. “Perhaps I could just…” And then he’s smoothing his hand gently over the obscured text, letting his touch miracle the stain away, his fingers jolting oddly as the writing beneath them clears.

“Well?” Crowley prods from where he stands leaning casually against Aziraphale’s desk. “What does it say?”

But Aziraphale doesn’t respond. Stares instead at his hand, his frown deepening as he turns it over, running his thumb across the fingertips. “That’s odd,” he murmurs, flexing his fingers a few times, then shaking his hand like someone trying to get rid of the slightly unpleasant sensation of numbness.

“What is?”

The angel ignores him still, his attention still riveted peculiarly to the fingers of his hand. But then his gaze begins to travel slowly up his arm as though tracing something’s invisible progress.

“Zira?” A note of concern slips into Crowley’s voice as he leans in closer, hand reaching out to touch Aziraphale’s shoulder.

The angel looks up at him before the contact happens – a troubling mixture of confusion and dismay in the wide blue eyes. “I… I think,” he begins, and Crowley does grab his shoulder now because there’s fear coloring his angel’s voice, and he doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know what’s going on, but seeing Zira like this – paling and scared – it scares him, too.

“Something’s…,” Aziraphale’s eyes momentarily lose their focus, and it takes both of Crowley’s arms to keep him from falling as he sways suddenly in his chair, tipping forward into Crowley’s shoulder as the demon crouches down before him. He pulls back a moment later, straightening himself out with visible effort. Blinks sluggishly at Crowley, whose heart is beating a mile a minute for a completely different reason now. 

“S’m’thing’s not… right,” the angel tries again, his breaths heavy around his slurred words. He gasps as if in pain, his near-ashen features momentarily twisting with the force of whatever it is that torments him. 

His wide, fever-bright eyes settle briefly on Crowley’s worry-filled ones, glistening with regret. A trembling hand brushes feebly across Crowley’s cheek, lingering there for less than a heartbeat before falling limply back down into Aziraphale’s lap. “M’so sorry, my dear…”

And then his eyes roll closed and he slumps, heavy and boneless, into Crowley’s frantic embrace.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some new (old) players enter the field

Chapter 2

Anathema didn’t know what this day would bring when she woke up this morning, snug in the arms of her Destined (not Chosen, no, but Destined and then, gradually, grudgingly, Accepted) lover. Just like any other day forward from the moment she burned the second book of prophecies written by her occultist ancestor. Every day now was a surprise, every action, every choice she made – a novelty, one whose outcome she could now neither know nor even imagine.

She finds she quite likes the unexpectedness, the suspense of it. Enjoys it even. (Even when it involves trying out Newt’s latest cooking adventure, which, on occasion, even manages to come out edible and only slightly burned).

Yet having her and Newt’s breakfast interrupted by the sudden appearance of the red-haired demon she remembers from the events leading up to the Armageddon-That-Didn’t that materializes in the middle of her kitchen in a puff of gray smoke, clutching his white-haired angel companion in his arms, is something that makes her reconsider the wisdom of burning those prophetic pages all those months ago.

Across from her at the table Newt lets out a rather undignified squeak that she guesses is due, at least in part, to the cup of tea, whose scaldingly hot contents are currently spreading all across the front of his trousers. She stands up shakily, sparing a quick thought of gratitude for the fact that she hadn’t yet touched her own tea and that her cup still stood safely on its saucer. Whirls on the pair with the righteous anger of one who had just been startled into near choking on a piece of an overcooked omelette.

“What… the hell are you two-?”

“I can’t heal him!” the demon interrupts in a low, desperate growl, his wild gaze sweeping blindly across the room before it settles with desperate urgency on Anathema. 

And now that Anathema had a chance to calm down from the shock of their unexpected arrival, she begins to notice things she didn’t see before. How limp the angel lies in the demon’s embrace, for instance. How pale, how unnaturally still he is. 

“I’ve tried…” The demon sways a bit, his knees buckling for a moment before he forcibly locks them in place. 

He’s sweating, Anathema realizes with a start, the pallor of his skin almost matching the unhealthy gray of the angel’s. _Power drain, _she thinks absently, as she takes a hesitant step toward them. _He must have tried to heal whatever’s wrong with the angel and used up too much. _The demon’s very next breathless words confirm her suspicions.

“I’ve tried everything, and I can’t… He won’t wake up.” Exhausted yellow eyes stare at her, pleading. “I need… I need your book. Maybe there’s something…” The demon trails off with an uncertain frown as she shakes her head, regretful. Tightens his grip on the unconscious angel. “What?”

“The first book of prophecies only covered as far as the End of the World,” Anathema explains, throwing a cautious look at Newt, unsurprised to see a hint of worry in the other’s eyes. Because… well, because, “There _was_ a second book, but I…”

“What?”

She looks away from the intense, questioning gaze of the slitted eyes. Focuses instead on the slack figure in the demon’s arms. “I burned it.”

“You _what_???” The demon lurches at her with a snarl, dark power crackling in the air around him, and Anathema’s certain that, in that instance, he wouldn’t hesitate to use that power against her. Even if it’s the very last of it he has to offer. Even if it drains him, _kills_ him in the process.

“Wh-what’s wrong with him?” Newt slides into the demon’s path, hands raised placatingly before him, and Anathema can’t help a flare of gratitude and surprised affection toward her un-Chosen stuttering idiot. Because, whatever else could be said about Newton Pulsifer – the hapless Witchfinder and Walking Calamity when it comes to all things electronic – seeing him come in between a murderous demon and the object of that demon’s wrath is nothing short of idiotic… but also, admittedly, rather arousingly attractive.

The demon falters in his forward progress, snake eyes flicking momentarily over to Newt’s fumbling figure before he closes them briefly, his face scrunching up as if in pain. When he looks back up at the two of them, Anathema is relieved to see that the feral glow in them has faded, and the exhaustion she had glimpsed earlier was back full force, tinged now with the unmistakable bleakness of hopeless despair. It echoes in a sharp twist of empathy in Anathema’s heart.

“There was a book,” the demon responds, a dull sound barely above a whisper. “One of those,” he drops his gaze down to the angel, still cradled securely against his chest, “one of those ancient moth-eaten folios he loves so much. He said the text was smudged in one spot… a… a stain or something. So he miracled it away and then…”

His expression twists again, although the pain it reflects, Anathema guesses, is hardly physical. Staggers in place, setting one foot back to keep his balance. 

Anathema can bear it no longer.

“There’s a couch in the next room,” she tells him as she boldly walks by him, motioning for him to come along. “Why don’t you set him down there and then show me that book.” She pauses when the demon makes no move to follow, turns back to face him, eyebrow arched. “Look,” she tries, “I may not have the Book of Prophecies anymore, but I _am _still a witch. And I’m guessing that whatever happened to your friend was caused by a curse of some kind.” She takes a step back toward him, trying her best to look undaunted by the demon’s grim-faced skepticism, “I know a thing or two about curses. Maybe I can help.” 

She doesn’t wait for him to respond. Simply turns back around and walks into the living room, hopeful that the demon will follow.

He does, and she release a soft sigh of relief as she watches him lower the angel onto the couch with utmost care, one hand lingering on the being’s chest as if reluctant to let go.

“Would you show me the book now?” she asks, gentle.

The demon nods, his gaze never straying from the angel’s unconscious form. Sticks out his hand, palm up, and an instant later a small time-yellowed book appears in its grasp. And Anathema’s fingers barely close over the faded cover, when the demon sways alarmingly – that one bit of magic seemingly having drained what little reserves he had left, and it is only Newt’s surprisingly quick reflexes that save him from crumpling to the floor as his legs fold underneath him.

Newt grunts under the added weight, his arms tightening around the near-boneless demon who slumps briefly against him. Throws a worried look at Anathema, who had stepped closer, too, her free hand reaching out to lend support.

The demon raises a shaky hand, forestalling her movement. Straightens out with visible effort, extricating himself from Newt’s hold. Staggers across the short distance that separates him from the couch.

“So what do you think, Witch Girl?” he grits out hoarsely, nodding to the book in Anathema’s hands, as he sinks down to sit beside the angel. “What can you do?”

She rolls her eyes at him, already flipping open the front cover. “Anathema,” she corrects with perfunctory primness.

“Huh?”

“My name,” she explains, giving him what she hopes is a disapproving glare from above the rims of her glasses. “I assume you have one, too? Or should I just go with Snake-Eyed Demon?”

He shakes his head, lips twitching slightly at the challenge in her voice. “Crowley will do just fine,” he offers grudgingly, then stands, wavering momentarily before stalking over to tower over Anathema. Prods, impatient, all trace of amusement gone, “Well?”

Anathema purses her lips, refusing to appear intimidated. Runs her fingertips across the warped yellowed page. It’s clean save for some black smudges right along the edges of the page, where one would have to run a finger to leaf through them. She touches the spots gingerly, leafs through the next few pages. They all appear to be in the same condition: a fairly large, inky black stain obscuring a portion of the text or drawing and a smudge of the same substance along the edge.

“You said the angel–“

“Aziraphale.”

“_Aziraphale_,” she amends with a mildly encouraging smile, “miracled the stain away.” At the demon’s nod of confirmation, she presses on, “How soon after that did he sense that something was wrong?”

“Right away, I think.” The demon casts a quick, worried glance at the angel’s stubbornly still form. “He knew right away.”

“Right.” Anathema runs her fingers along the stained edges one more time, holds them against the larger stain on the center of the page to be sure. Nothing, she doesn’t feel a thing. “There was a book I read a while ago,” she muses, “a guide to various potions and poisons against different creatures, mortal and occult. Oh, don’t give me that look,” playfully, she swats Newt on the shoulder, chastising. Points to her chest, “Witch, remember? Anyway, I remember the book mentioning a particularly potent, deadly poison that only impacted supernatural beings. I tried looking for it, actually, before coming to Tadfield – you know, for the whole Armageddon mess. Unsuccessfully, mind you,” she hurries to add when the demon scowls angrily at her words.

The demon looks back at the couch again, hands clenched in tight fists at his sides. “So whoever gave Aziraphale this book…”

“Intended for him to be poisoned, yes,” she nods, regretful. “The way those pages are stained, it… He would have had to come in contact with that substance, even if he didn’t bother miracling away that first stain. It would have been unavoidable.”

The demon growls low in his throat, and Anathema startles as a nearby window explodes in a shower of glass. “What about a cure?” He whirls back toward her, eyes aglow. “Come on, Witch G…_Anathema_, what about a cure?”

She swallows nervously, fighting the urge to step back under the savage intensity of his glare. “I don’t… it’s not that simple.”

The demon’s lips pull back in a snarl, the yellow of his irises bleeding out to cover his eyes fully, and she does move back this time. “Look,” she tries, hands raised in silent surrender, “this poison, it… the way it works is it binds the being’s powers the moment it enters its body, so they can’t do anything to fight it. And then… then it starts growing, destroying the being’s corporation cell by cell, until all that’s left is a powerless, severely weakened essence that–“

“Is there a way to stop it?”

She cringes at the abrupt forcefulness of the question; ventures forth, cautious, “The book talks about the possibility of transferring the poison into a… a similar receptacle, but–“

“Another angel, you mean.” The demon slides in closer. “Fallen or otherwise?”

And she can see the faint flicker of hope in those burning pools of slitted gold; knows exactly what the demon intends to do. And she can’t let him; can’t allow him to cling to the deceitful, deadly promise of it. 

“Don’t,” she cautions. “You… It’ll kill you.”

The demon huffs, unimpressed. “Yeah, I got that part – what with the whole ‘deadly’ and ‘potent’ spiel. Not an idiot, thank you. Now tell me what I need to do.”

And Anathema admires that kind of loyalty – that readiness to sacrifice himself for his… his friend(?), his lover(?); she really does. But… “You don’t understand,” she insists. “The poison, when it’s absorbed upon initial contact, it works and grows slowly. Painlessly almost. But upon transfer… well, it’s already had a chance to spread and evolve, and it’ll be so much faster, so much more powerful, it…” She presses her lips together, a twinge of inexplicable sympathy and worry tugging at her heart. “It won’t just kill you,” she whispers, almost hoping he would reconsider. “It’ll _torture_ you while it does it. It… it’ll be brutal.”

The demon’s lips twist into a bitter smirk, a calm acceptance in the amber gaze. “Fast and brutal,” he sums up, sounding strangely matter-of-fact. “Just like old times.” Something flashes across his face – a fleeting trace of an unpleasant memory. He blinks it away, his smile turning strained as he addresses Anathema once again. “Come on, then, Witch Girl. Tell me what to do.”


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

He sits quietly on the edge of the couch, cradling Aziraphale’s limp hand in his own, clinging to it while he still can. Watches as the Witch Girl (_Anathema_, comes unbidden a begrudging correction from the depths of his exhausted mind) carefully places thick candles on intricate sigils drawn at various strategic points on the magic circle she had just finished tracing around the couch: one for Body, one for Soul, one for Poison, one for Cure, one for Dark, one for Light, and the last one in the very center by Crowley and Aziraphale’s joint hands – for Life. Finishing touches for the ritual that is meant to save Aziraphale’s life while ending his own.

“I have a… a favor to ask,” he says, voice hoarse from prolonged silence and the tension that fills the room, “of both of you.”

He sees her falter slightly in her movements, feels the other human (_Toad? Salamander? Oh, right, Newt!_) tense behind him in anticipation. He scoffs, lips twisting into a bitter smirk. 

“Nothing demonic,” he reassures them, just this side of sarcastic, “don’t worry.”

The human girl looks uncomfortable now; fiddles nervously with the book of spells she had dug out earlier from under a pile of dust-coated occult tools and rubbish magazines. “That’s not what I…” She throws an awkward glance at the other human, as if asking for his support. “I wasn’t…”

Crowley raises his free hand, forestalling her further pitiful attempts at clarification. Curls the fingers of his other hand tighter around Aziraphale’s.

“If the ritual works…” He looks down at their joint hands, at the candle standing on the Life sigil beside them. “Whoever did this to him, whoever’s behind this, they’re still gonna be out there, and I… I won’t be here to…”

He trails off, tamping down on a wave of all-too-real fear that threatens to choke him. Because there it is, isn’t it – the _rub_ as the angel’s favorite bard called it. If the ritual works, Aziraphale will live, but the threat to his life will still remain. And the next time Crowley won’t be there to stop it.

“We’ll look after him.”

His head snaps up at Anathema’s unexpected pledge, wide eyes watching her with a mixture of shocked surprise and timid, disbelieving hope.

“We will,” she asserts in response to his silent question, quiet but firm. “Between a Witch and a Witchfinder,” she winks at the Newt guy over Crowley’s head, “I think we can handle it. And if not…” She shrugs, giving him a small smile that is a bit too tight to be reassuring, although Crowley appreciates the effort nonetheless. “If not, we’ve got a veritable Antichrist living next door, so…”

“Lucky thing, that,” Crowley intones with an amused twitch of his lips. Then grows somber once more, adds, low and sincere, “Thank you.”

She nods, lips pursed in sympathetic concern. Lays the spells book open on a one-legged side table next to the couch; pulls out a small athame. Looks back at him, hesitant. “Is there anything you want us to tell him for you or…?”

“What, like my last will and testament?” He raises a mocking eyebrow at her, trying to keep his tone light despite the fact his heart twists sharply at the cruel reminder that this is it for him – no more quiet evenings at the bookshop, no more companionable strolls through the park, no more dinners at the Ritz.

The girl, Anathema, just stares at him with that expression of unbearable knowing sympathy that makes Crowley’s skin itch.

He grits his teeth sharply, forcing down the urge to snarl at her. Looks back at his angel’s face, almost translucently pale now. There is… _so _much he still wanted to say to him, so much of his thoughts, his feelings he still wanted, no _needed _to voice. 

He can do none of that now. Not here, not to these virtual strangers, not under these circumstances. It’s too late.

But there is one thing he could say, one message he could relay to his angel that would, perhaps, leave Zira with some fond memories of him, perhaps even make the angel smile when he thinks of him.

“My plants,” he murmurs, his fingers tracing an unconscious line along the angel’s brow. He stills as he realizes what he’s doing, pulls his hand away. Coughs sharply to clear his suddenly too tight throat. “I have plants,” he tries again, voice inexplicably rough, “lots of plants. It…uh… it would be a shame if they all went to waste. Plus they get lonely without company, so… so if he wouldn’t mind stopping by to… to water them every once in a while…”

He chances a glance at Anathema; cringes at the too-soft expression on the human’s face. It makes him feel too open somehow, too vulnerable, too raw, and he bristles with sudden defensive anger. “Make sure to tell him not to even _think _about being nice to them!” he snarls with exaggerated hostility, giving her his best glare. “If I find out he’s been paying them compliments, I’m gonna come back and throttle him myself.”

“Got it.” Her response comes with a soft, understanding smile, and Crowley has to stifle another urge to snap at her.

“Let’s get this over with, shall we,” he growls out instead, forcing himself to relinquish his hold on Aziraphale’s hand, and holds out his hand to her as she steps closer.

“Do you remember what I told you?” she asks as she gently grasps his proffered hand, the athame poised above his open palm.

“Don’t let go, no matter what,” he repeats dutifully and manages not to hiss as she runs the blade across his palm, long and deep.

She lets go of his hand, picks up Aziraphale’s. “It’s important not to break the connection until the transfer is complete,” she reiterates, cutting an identical line across the angel’s palm. “If even a little bit of the poison remains behind…”

“The thing regrows and we’re back to square one.”

“Precisely,” she nods and holds Aziraphale’s hand for Crowley to take.

He does, wraps his fingers tightly around the unresponsive palm, their cuts pressing against one another, dark ichor mixing with gold. “Don’t worry, Witch Girl,” he assures her with feigned lightheartedness, “I got this.”

It turns out to be a much harder promise to keep than he realized.

***

Nothing happens at first, not until Anathema finishes reciting the last of the spell. And even then all he feels is a slight tingle at the site of the cut, a tingle that slowly begins to intensify – a ribbon of liquid fire that lances up his arm with all the fluidity and speed of a black mamba, swiftly, instantly spreading across his entire body. And then all he’s aware of is pain – searing, all-encompassing, roaring inferno of pain that tears through every particle of his being, rending, scorching, obliterating.

Falling was a bit like that, he thinks dimly, as he struggles to maintain his ever-weakening hold on consciousness, to keep his weak traitorous burning fingers from unclasping from around the angel’s hand. Except with Falling he was only too happy to give in to the overwhelming, excruciating pain, to surrender to the darkness, to let go. He can’t do that now. Not when Aziraphale’s life is at stake.

So he grinds his teeth together, clamping down on a useless scream, imagines his fingers clench tightly into Aziraphale’s skin, and he hangs on.

And when his consciousness splinters apart, tiny fragments swallowed up by the unforgiving darkness, and his tortured, broken body sinks to the floor with one final shuddered breath, his desperate grip lingers, sustained by the fading power of his demonic essence.

Until that, too, flickers out.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The smell is what awakens him – a strange mix of burning candles and burnt… eggs? _Odd_, he thinks, his nose wrinkling in mild distaste. Did he leave the stove on? He doesn’t remember cooking before falling asleep, but he… must have? He better get up either way before he causes a fire. A fire in a bookshop? Heaven forbid! Still… eggs? What an odd choice…

“Aziraphale?” 

He startles at the hesitant call of his name – a voice soft and feminine and only vaguely familiar. Blinks open his eyes, staring in wrinkle-browed confusion at the face of a young woman that swims into his vision. 

“It’s alright,” she tells him, one hand reaching out to flutter hesitantly over his shoulder before gingerly touching down in a show of comfort. “You’re safe.”

_Safe from what_, he wants to ask, but the answer comes even as he opens his mouth and he gasps instead, jerking upright in remembered shock. “The book! I was–”

“Poisoned, yes,” the woman nods, grim. “The pages were saturated with a very potent concoction that targets only supernatural beings.” She pauses, her lips pursed with pity. “I’m afraid whoever gave that book to you intended for you to die.” 

He digests the information, silent and dry-mouthed. Thinks back to that first odd tingle that raced up his fingertips like an errant spark from a faulty electric outlet. To the subsequent rapidly evolving sensation of terrifying numbness that seemed to overtake his body, his powers deadly silent within him. To the heartbreaking look of worry in Crowley’s eyes and his desperate grip on Aziraphale’s shoulders, even as darkness closed over Aziraphale’s sight…

“How?” he murmurs unintelligibly. “Where…?” 

“You’re in my house, in Tadfield,” the woman supplies, and, _oh_, he remembers her now: the girl with the Book, the Prophecies. “Your friend… Crowley? He brought you here. Thought I could help.”

“Oh…” That made sense. If the poison was truly intended to work against any supernatural beings, then Crowley wouldn’t have been able to do anything to heal him. But Agnes Nutter’s Book of Prophecies would surely have had something useful in it for just that sort of thing. And he’s just infinitely lucky, is he not, to have such a wonderful quick-thinking demon as a friend. He must remember to show Crowley just how much he appreciates him, how thankful he is for his friendship and for his having the forethought to bring him here, even though he’s sure it must not have been easy for someone like Crowley to admit to needing help, _especially_ from a human.

But first…

“My dear girl,” he starts, giving the woman his most dazzling, most sincere smile, “I fear I don’t have enough words to express how infinitely grateful I am for your assistance in freeing me from this dreadful toxin. I… I guess I owe you my life. I…”

He trails off, frowning in confusion when, instead of the expected blush of embarrassed humility, the woman’s expression crumples in obvious distress, her gaze flicking over to the back of the room where he just now notices another human – the bespectacled curly-haired fellow he faintly remembers from that day at the Tadfield Airbase.

“I merely… I merely read the spell,” she murmurs quietly, not quite meeting Aziraphale’s puzzled stare. “I’m not the one who…”

“Not the one who _what_?”

She hesitates, long fingers twisting in the folds of her dress, and that hesitation makes something unpleasantly cold and clammy unfurl in Aziraphale’s chest.

“Dear girl?” he prompts, the unsettling feeling in chest growing stronger as he watches her hands curl sharply into fists before she finally, grudgingly raises her head to look at him. And, oh, _oh_, he doesn’t like the sorrowful, pitying look in those eyes. Not one bit. It reminds him of the look Crowley gave him when he told him that his bookshop had burned down. 

Speaking of…

“Where’s Crowley?”

“The spell,” the woman begins, flinching minutely at his question, “the only one that could work in your case was a… a transfer spell of sorts… a… a way to…uh… _move_ the poison from one supernatural being into another…”

He knows where this is going – in his metaphorical heart of hearts, in his very soul, and, no, just, _no_. It can’t be. It’s impossible!

He stands jerkily, takes a few unsteady steps forward, stumbling outside the burning stumps of candles that mark the boundaries of a chalk-drawn circle. “Crowley?” he calls out, tremulous, his chest twinging with mounting worry at the ominous silence that greets his call. “Crowley, dear, where are you?”

There’s a shuffle of movement behind him, a hesitant touch of a hand on his shoulder, and he tenses, breathing harshly against the sudden, irrational urge to throw the unwelcome hand off.

“There was no other way to save you, and your friend, he… he knew that,” the woman’s voice floats toward him, gentle and sympathetic, and he shakes his head in desperate denial, pulls himself out of her reach with another pleading, frantic call of his friend’s name.

“Crowley?!”

“I told him that it would… that it would destroy him, but… he was… he insisted… and…”

“And what?” He whirls on her sharply, his eyes pleading, _nay_, demanding that she deny what he already knows is true.

But she shakes her head at his silent plea, her own eyes shining with tears and regret as they meet his briefly before flicking down to his right hand. Dazedly, he follows her gaze. Stares, unblinking, at the slowly healing scar that runs across his palm, as the words, damning and merciless, continue to wash over him.

“The amount of poison he had to absorb – it wasn’t gradual the way it happened with you. The poison had already multiplied, spread all through your being, and… and he had to take on all of it, all at once.”

A memory comes to him, unbidden – a sensation brought out by his subconscious: a phantom grip of long delicate fingers on his hand, a press of cold skin against his own….

“It was too much. I didn’t think he would be able to withstand it, but… he was determined.”

And that’s Crowley, alright. The demon who waltzed onto consecrated grounds and drove a burning car through a wall of fire by sheer determination. Because Aziraphale needed him. Because Aziraphale was in danger. Because… because…

He raises his eyes to her again, her features blurring before him, washed out like a freshly painted landscape left out in the rain. “Please…,” he whispers – a breathless, hopeless plea.

She presses her lips together, her eyebrows furrowing in sympathetic grief. “I’m sorry. I’m so, _so _sorry.” 

She reaches out for him again, and this time he simply has no will left to pull away. Stands there numbly as her fingers close lightly around his wrist.

Something wet trails down his cheek and he raises his free hand to wipe away the strange moisture. Squints in dismay at the way his appendage trembles, weak and uncontrollable, as though it no longer belonged to him.

“He can’t be gone,” he protests, but his lower lip wobbles traitorously, his voice catching on the words and breaking pathetically in the middle. “He… he can’t… I…”

The grasp on his wrist tightens, pulling him gently but insistently forward, and he goes willingly. Collapses to his knees like a broken puppet as the woman’s arms wrap around his oddly heaving, shuddering frame. 

And sobs.  


***

“Crowley, Crowley, Crowley…”

A voice – mockingly disappointed and menacingly familiar – welcomes his return to consciousness, and he latches on to the uncomfortable familiarity of it, lets his senses expand. To the hard floor underneath his cheek, steeped in centuries of grime and filth. To the hot, oppressive air around him that reeks of sulfur and the promise of eternal torment. To the looming hostile presence above him, the gag-inducing stench of sewage and rot…. 

_Hastur. _

_Hell_. He’s back in Hell.

A sharp-toed boot slams into his side with all the force of a battering ram, flipping him callously onto his back, and he lies there, breathless, gasping in pain.

The booted foot presses down on his chest. “Hello, Crowley.”

Grudgingly he peels his eyes open a slit, glares up at the demon with as defiant a sneer as he can manage. “Hastur!” he rasps out, trying for nonchalant, as difficult as it may be to accomplish in his rather compromised position. “Long time no see. How does your Dukeship these days?”

Hastur grinds his boot harder into Crowley’s ribs in response; leans down to place all of his weight onto that leg. 

“I owe you pain, Crowley,” the Duke of Hell snarls, two bottomless pools of pure black hatred zeroing in on Crowley’s face. “Years and years of pain. I’ll make you writhe with it like the pathetic snake you are. I’ll make you squeal and beg for me to put you out of your–“

“S-such a… t-tease…,” Crowley cuts in past the unbearable pressure on his chest.

The retribution is immediate – the booted foot rising into the air only to crash brutally back down onto his exposed chest, a sharp crack of bone accompanying the movement, and Crowley jerks violently with the sheer breath-stealing pain of it, eyes blown wide. He doesn’t have his human corporation anymore and he never did really need to breathe, but, oh bloody hell, it hurts!

Still, it was worth it, _Satan _knows it was worth it – just for the sheer pleasure of yanking Hastur’s chain, and he can’t help a small triumphant grin that pulls at his lips even as he struggles to suck in a proper breath.

“You will be begging me to kill you by the time I’m finished with you, CrAWley,” Hastur drawls out, deliberate. “And nothing… _nothing _is gonna help you. Not your little eye trick, certainly not that smart-ass mouth of yours. I–”

“Eye trick?” He blinks, confused.

“Whazz wrong with hizz eyezzz?” a new voice calls out from somewhere beyond Hastur, and Crowley grunts from added discomfort, the foot on his chest grinding against his ribs as the Duke of Hell twists around to greet the newcomer.

“Your Highness…”

“Whazz wrong with hizz eyezzz?” the Prince of Hell repeats, ignoring Hastur and his greeting altogether as they step closer. Lean over Crowley, narrowing their gaze in silent scrutiny; reach down to scrape a clawed finger along Crowley’s cheek. “Interezzting…”

“He’s trying to disguise himself as an angel,” Hastur supplies, and Crowley’s level of confusion shifts rapidly from _“Huh?” _to _“What the fuck?”_. “Probably thought we wouldn’t recognize him like this.”

Beelzebub do not appear convinced, pale watery-blue eyes skimming carefully over every inch of Crowley’s face, sliding down to his shoulders, arms. Crowley follows their gaze instinctively, stares in dismay at the mesmerizing starbright patterns splashed across the expanse of his skin that, only recently, was studded with freckles. But he doesn’t have time to form any coherent thoughts about what it is he’s seeing because Beelzebub shift closer still, their hand clasping around his shoulder, and he suddenly finds himself being jackknifed upwards with a muffled oomph, even as Hastur is forced to take a hurried step back.

“Wingzzz!” Beelzebub demand, their hand now pressing roughly between his shoulder blades.

He complies – of course he does, it’s not like he has much of a choice. And feels his metaphorical heart stutter in stunned wonderment as he watches the familiar rich raven-black of his feathers leach slowly out to heavenly white. _What in Satan’s name…?_

“I zzzink we should let our Mazzzter take a look,” cuts in ominously into the turbid confusion of his thoughts and then with a snap of Beelzebub’s fingers his surroundings twist and morph and he finds himself kneeling on the fire-singed floor of the throne room with the Duke and the Prince of Hell standing with their heads inclined in a respectful bow on either side of him, while before them, cloaked in a cloud of brimstone, looms the terrifying winged figure of the Lord of Hell himself – Lucifer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo.... my muse decided to spice things up a bit. All shall be explained in the coming chapters :)


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The walls of the throne room tremble and shake, bits of rock falling down with each heavy, deliberate step the Lord of Hell takes in his direction, each one reverberating through the uneven rocky floor, echoing sharply in his broken ribs. Beside him he can feel the other two demons shift away, moving further out of the range of their Master’s anger.

Crowley is not so lucky.

A large clawed hand wraps around his neck, and he is raised high into the air, his back slammed forcefully against the wall.

“Raphael…,” Satan growls out, two bottomless pits of blackness glaring at Crowley from a giant Hellfire-singed face.

It’s a name Crowley hasn’t heard in millennia; has done his best to forget both that God-forsaken name and everything that was attached to it when She cast him out into a pit of boiling sulfur, letting everything he ever was burn away until nothing but a tiny spark of his angelic essence remained, buried forever deep within a revolting snakelike frame.

It is Her ultimate idea of a joke, he supposes, that, now that he’s sacrificed all of himself for his angel and allowed the poison to burn away and destroy his Hell-given powers and his demonic essence, She let his long-forgotten, brutally discarded and obscured angelic essence become exposed once more… and left him,

as he was,

in the clutches of Hell.

He knew She was a vindictive God. (If the Fall alone did not convince him, he had plenty of other vivid examples of Her Wrath or Her equally destructive Indifference over the millennia to know better). Still… this felt like a particularly vicious, low blow. Even for Her.

“I was… _pleased_,” the Great Beast snarls into his face, interrupting the bitter flow of his thoughts, “when I heard that the demon traitor who thwarted _MY _plans for Armageddon AND his subsequent execution was finally back in my domain to receive his just deserts. I had instructed my _loyal_ subjects to inflict appropriately delicious torment on your worthless soul.” 

The Lord of Hell leans closer, black lips pulling back to reveal a row of jagged, dagger-like teeth. Hisses out, low and menacing, his sulfur-rich breath wafting over Crowley’s face, thick and suffocating, “But to learn that the double-crossing snake is my wayward baby brother…” The grip around his throat tightens, the hand yanking him briefly forward before knocking him forcefully back into the wall to punctuate the angry spit of words, “My own brother! Plotting behind my back. And for what? Humans? The Earth? That fat excuse of an angel you’ve been fraternizing with all these years?” 

He shakes him, roughly, as if Crowley were one of those souvenir toys he’d seen in a store once – ones filled with liquid and tiny bits of glitter that, when shaken, imitate the downward float of the falling snow. Snow globes humans call them. Crowley’s head, too, feels very much like a thoroughly shaken snow globe, and he squeezes his eyes shut as the room swims around him in twisted, nauseating patterns. 

And opens them with a strangled cry only moments later as Satan’s other hand presses against his chest and the five claws extend forth, razor-sharp and unnaturally long, tearing through him like knives through paper. The hand around his neck lets go, and he is left suspended on these five clawed blades – a pinned butterfly on display. His body trembles and spasms under the brutal onslaught of pain, as he gasps uselessly, convulsively for air. 

He only ever got in the habit of breathing just to blend in with the humans – never really had the need for it otherwise. But in this moment, now, he suddenly feels a desperate, terrifying urgency to do so, because he feels like he’s drowning, suffocating in his own blood, his chest rent apart and caving in under the awful pressure. 

There’s a loud roaring that fills his ears, growing louder and louder the longer he stays there, dangling helplessly off Satan’s claws. He tries to focus past it, tries to fix his wavering vision on the enormous sharp-toothed mouth that swims before him, close, too close for comfort. The black lips move once more, words spilling out in a hiss, and Crowley squints, trying to process them, trying to understand.

“Betrayal is one thing, little brother. But you? You have disappointed me. And I _reaaalllly _hate being disappointed.”

The black lips twist into a moue of disgust and Satan steps back a bit, the claws that skewer Crowley shrinking back to their normal size, slipping abruptly out of his body with a sickening wet slurp. Their unwelcome support removed, Crowley drops to the floor in a broken heap – a discarded marionette with its strings cut. And Satan’s words continue to flow over him, low and gleefully vengeful, spelling out his doom.

“It was so very _kind _of Mother to deliver you to me without your demonic disguise. The demon Crowley would have been tortured by my subjects for centuries for his role in stopping the Apocalypse. But he would eventually have been wiped permanently from existence.”

The horned head looms closer, the fire-reddened visage wrinkling with hatred. “But you, _dear brother_, you will be mine forever. For all eternity. You will be bled; you will be flayed; you will be torn from limb to limb, your wings ripped off your body; you will be burned; chopped into bits; boiled in the Pit for years on end. And each and every time you will be put back together again, so your torture can start all over. 

And you will never… _EVER _be given the mercy of death.”

***

It is nearly two weeks before Aziraphale finally crosses the threshold of Crowley’s apartment. 

He spent most of those weeks getting thoroughly, deplorably sloshed. Because facing the reality that Crowley was well and truly gone (and he was, Aziraphale was dismally certain of that fact: could no longer detect even a hint of his demonic essence, no matter how far he let his powers stretch), facing _that _reality sober was not something he was prepared to do. And so he drank, and he drank, and he drank, hoping for the smothering fog of intoxication to dampen at least some of the pain that Crowley’s absence left behind.

With the amount of alcohol he managed to consume over that near fortnight he would have probably succeeded in discorporating himself (an outcome he would have quite possibly willingly embraced), if it were not for his human hosts. As patient as they were with him – allowing him that time to <strike>grieve</strike> (drink himself to oblivion), that patience, as with everything else in life, had finally come to an end. 

He can’t say he was overly surprised when Anathema burst into the spare bedroom of her cottage that he’d been using as his own private liquor-steeped hell, yanked the latest bottle he had just miraculously refilled moments prior out of his hand, smashing it with visible satisfaction against the nearby wall, and proceeded to yell at him using language that, he’s pretty sure, would have made even a demon blush.

But it was the quiet, disappointed words that she threw at him after her angry tirade was over that cut through the self-pitying, alcohol-thick haze. Made him sober up quicker than any miracle would have.

_“Your friend went through all that pain, all that torment… to save you. And this is how you choose to honor his sacrifice?”_

He could’ve have argued, he supposes. Could have objected that his life didn’t matter, that nothing mattered now that Crowley was gone. But Crowley’s sacrifice deserved better. _Crowley_ deserved better. So the angel drained the alcohol out of his system, miracled away the stench and stained rumpledness of his clothes, and forced himself to move on.

He didn’t dare go back to Soho. Couldn’t bear the thought of setting foot inside his bookshop. As irrational as it was, his books now served as a reminder of a cursed weakness that allowed some foul fiend to so easily exploit him; a weakness that led to his dear Crowley’s death. 

No, he couldn’t go back there, and so the shop remained closed. Until further notice, as the sign, newly miracled to hang above the doorknob, announced.

Crowley’s flat, however… Crowley’s flat was another thing entirely. And as much as it hurt Aziraphale to walk into that forever empty, forever cold and soulless place, he owed it to Crowley to take care of it, to take care of his plants. It was his penance, the punishment he deserved for letting something so wonderful, so precious slip away from him. Over a cursed book!

He lingers in the threshold, Newt and Anathema hovering protectively just behind him – his two ever-present personal guards, appointed to that role by Crowley himself.

It was Anathema who told him, haltingly, grudgingly, about Crowley’s final request for her and Newt to look after Aziraphale, to protect him. And Aziraphale doesn’t know what to do with that information, with the knowledge that even then, at that awful moment, in the face of certain, excruciating death, his demon’s final thoughts were only of keeping Aziraphale safe. He doesn’t know if he will ever be able to handle the weight of that knowledge. It makes his metaphorical heart twist with sharp, echoing pain; makes him long for the artificial relief of a wine bottle. Makes him regret so, _so _many things he’d said to Crowley over the years. Makes him regret even more all the things he hadn’t.

He closes his eyes briefly, digs deep to gather himself. 

“Would you two mind…?” he starts, then stops, his too-dry throat catching painfully on the words. Swallows, tries again, glancing back at them over his shoulder. “I’d like to go in alone… Please?”

His humans friends hesitate, a worried look shared flash-like between them. In the end, Anathema nods, reluctant. “We’ll be right outside if you need us.”

He nods and steps fully inside, letting the door fall shut behind him, heavy and loud like the lid of a coffin. He shudders at the morbid comparison, his eyes watering despite himself as he takes in the unbearably empty, oppressively dark flat that seems even more desolate now, shrouded in shadows and coated in days-old dust that its owner was no longer here to simply imagine away. 

He forces his feet forward, past the hallway, past the office with its enormous lacquered desk and its ostentatious golden throne with cushions of dark red velvet – both looking smaller somehow, crushed by the overwhelming, lingering darkness. And stops, hovering in guilt-ridden shock at the threshold of Crowley’s indoor garden – the only area in the flat where some light filters through the blind-covered windows, lingering in the dust-filled air, pooling over the plants.

_The plants. Oh, dear Lord, the plants…. _

Unsteadily, he steps inside, trembling fingers running over the leaves that stretch weakly, pleadingly toward him – some still miraculously, beautifully verdant, while others …. 

_Oh, Crowley, oh, what have I done_

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out miserably, tears of anguish and remorse rolling down his cheeks as he drops to his knees beside a formerly luxuriant rubber plant, whose now brown-spotted leaves droop hopelessly to the ground. Reaches a quivering hand to softly, reverently trace the dying brown veins. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Crowley wanted him to take care of them. He was told as much by his human hosts (not that it truly registered at the time in the alcohol-soaked brain of his). Crowley _wanted _him to take care of his garden. And instead he all but neglected it to destruction.

But he will fix it. He will fix every last one of them. Restore them all to their previous lush beauty and keep them that way for as long as he lives. 

It’s the least (the _only _thing) he can do.

***

Time passes differently in Hell. It warps and stretches, collapses in on itself, then erupts with all the fury of a supernova, speeding up to some unknown end. Crowley couldn’t keep track of it if he tried. 

He doesn’t bother. Focuses on other things instead, simpler things: the sound of approaching footsteps outside the door of his cell; the stench of his own burned flesh – constant now, despite the merciless healings that are forced on him after his every plunge into the Pit; the equally constant ache of torn limbs fused carelessly back together to be torn apart again at a future session; the sting of his skin, flayed to thin red ribbons that would hang off him like pieces of a shredded shirt and restored haphazardly long after he’d lose consciousness; the unbearable, ever-increasing pressure in his arms and shoulders when he’s forced to hang by his wrists for an interminable amount of time; the sharp spasms that jolt through his brutally broken, shredded wings – the one part of him they never bothered to heal (_“You ain’t ever going anywhere, CrAWley. You won’t be needing these anymore.”_); a steady drip-drip-drip of his blood as it hits the floor below him, pooling at his feet….

He doesn’t sleep much here. Sleep is a reprieve, a luxury that he is simply not allowed. And whatever brief respite he does get between the end of one round of torture and the start of the next one, he spends either fully unconscious or drifting numbly in a thick fog of pain – his thoughts, his memories, his very consciousness stifled by it virtually to the point of nonexistence.

Today… today is different somehow. Today they finish early, earlier than usual. Leave him alone in his cell while he’s still coherent enough to track their movement back toward and out the door.

He blinks after them sluggishly, lets his too-too heavy eyelids slide closed. Breathes, raspy and labored, past the uncomfortable vise of a broken ribcage, past the pain of dislocated shoulders that are forced to bear his weight, past the burning sting of fresh bleeding welts that criss-cross his back – imprints of a whip doused in Hellfire. 

And for the first time in what feels like forever, he manages to cling to consciousness long enough to let his mind drift back to the memories of before: to the bookshop with its warm, inviting clutter; to the Ritz with its crisp white tablecloths and the soft clinking of glasses; to St James’ Park with its rain-splattered sidewalks and its brazen, ever-present ducks…; and to Aziraphale. Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale. Right there beside him. Always. With his stupidly soft, fond smile and his blue-blue eyes and those shy longing looks and the hand that sometimes lingers in Crowley’s….

“Zira…,” he exhales, dry, blood-spattered lips twitching into a smile, parting just enough to release that tiny breath of a name, a reverent prayer, an impossible dream. 

His body sags, boneless, his consciousness succumbing finally to the relentless onslaught of pain. But the faint, blissful smile remains.

***

Miles and miles above him in a Mayfair flat in London an angel, sitting slumped in post-healing exhaustion beside a newly verdant rubber plant, straightens out suddenly, his red-rimmed eyes flying open, a gasp of a name falling from his lips.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

Anathema jumps back, barely suppressing a startled shout as the door to Crowley’s flat is flung open with a bang to reveal one very disheveled wild-eyed angel.

“He’s alive!” the angel blurts out before she even has a chance to take a proper, non-stuttering breath. “I heard him, he’s alive!”

“H-heard?” Newt stammers out beside her, but Anathema pays him no heed, stares instead at Aziraphale who flicks his manic gaze between the two of them.

“Crowley… I heard his voice… in my head… I….” The angel stares at her, hope and plea in the wide blue eyes. “It was him. I know it was him!”

“Alright.” She nods, pulls all of them back inside the flat, away from potential prying eyes. Closes the door behind her before rounding on the angel. “What exactly did you hear?”

The angel fidgets in place, restless energy rolling off of him in waves. He reminds Anathema of a racehorse that prances impatiently behind the closed gate, itching to sprint forward at breakneck speed. 

“It was… he called me. My name, that is. I…”

“You sure it was him?”

Aziraphale blinks at her, an offended frown cutting a crease between his eyebrows. “Of course it was him!” he insists, indignant. “My dear girl, I’ve known him for over 6000 years. I’d recognize him anywhere!”

She presses her lips together with a dubious frown. Thinks back to those awful moments just before Crowley’s form disappeared in a thick cloud of sulfurous smoke: the black lines of poison that snaked forth from where his hand was wrapped around Aziraphale’s and raced up arm, rapidly consuming the rest of his body; the impossibly strained cords of his neck; his ghostly pale face twisted in pain…

“He’s gone,” she points out, trying to soften the blow of her words as much as she can, even as Aziraphale flinches at the merciless reminder. “You said yourself that you couldn’t even sense him anymore.”

The angel’s chin wobbles momentarily and he runs an obviously shaking hand through his already disheveled hair. “I know,” comes the pained, breathless exhale of admission, “I _know_.” He meets Anathema’s gaze again, despair mixed with determination in the tear-clouded blues. “But I also know I heard him. Just now. In my head. Calling for me. He felt… different. He… he sounded exhausted, in pain. But it was him!”

“Different?” Newt speaks up finally somewhere beside her, and, _good for him_, she thinks, _good for him for picking up on that_. “Different how?”

Aziraphale hesitates, pale brows drawing together in a frown of uncertainty. “I’m… _not _certain, exactly,” he hedges, the fingers of his right hand fluttering in the air as if to grasp some invisible thread. “I couldn’t… His essence, it felt… w-w-well, it was familiar but a bit… _odd_.” He lets his hand drop; shrugs, helpless. “I can’t really tell you anything more than that.”

_Odd… _Anathema latches on to that word. “Is it possible,” she asks, careful, “that it wasn’t Crowley at all? That someone was trying to trick you? Mimicking him?”

Aziraphale’s expression morphs into one of genuine outrage, and he straightens out, indignant, blue eyes flashing. “I am not a fool, Ms. Device,” he states, voice shaking with cold fury. “I know what I heard, what I _felt_. And even if it isn’t…” He trails off momentarily, lips pressed together in a tight white line, as if he were trying very hard to keep something from escaping. Closes his eyes briefly, taking a long, calming breath through his nose. “Even if it isn’t… _him_,” he repeats, quieter this time, “even if it’s a trap… it’s the first… the first sign of his presence I felt in weeks, and I… I have to investigate it.” The angel raises his head higher, blue eyes flying open once more, blazing with stubborn, unfaltering determination. “I owe it to Crowley to try.”

***

“_This_ is what you had in mind?” Anathema squeaks out from behind him, incredulous, and he pauses briefly in his preparations, turns back toward her, an eyebrow raised in silent question.

“What is it?” Beside her Newt peers curiously at the chalk drawn circle on the ground in the middle of their living room, at the intricate sigils within.

“A demon summoning circle,” Anathema responds, sounding somehow in equal parts anxious and disapproving. 

“A demon _trap,” _Aziraphale corrects her primly as he turns back to his task, carefully placing the last of the candles onto its designated spot. Because this is, indeed, what he intends for it to be. A trap – unbreakable and as permanent as he wishes for it to be. Deadly, too, if he wishes for it be so.

“Why?”

His task complete, Aziraphale stands up, takes a step back from the circle. “Why what, my dear girl?”

“This!” Anathema stabs her hand emphatically in the direction of the aforementioned trap. “Why are we summoning a demon here?”

There’s more fear in her aura now than disapproval, and Aziraphale is reminded sharply, vividly that, witch or not, she _is _only human, and the idea of dealing with another demon (one that wouldn’t be anything at all like Crowley) was quite probably (and quite rightly) terrifying for her.

He takes a step closer; smiles, calm and reassuring. “I need information,” he tells her, patient, frank. “I need to find out where Crowley is. So I am calling on a higher level demon. A duke by Hell’s standards. If Crowley is being held anywhere in Hell, he would know. And he won’t harm you, _either _of you,” he adds with an assuring nod toward Newt, “do not worry.”

Anathema frowns, uncertain. Flicks a quick, careful gaze at her hovering boyfriend, whose nervously wide eyes seem to indicate an equal level of alarm.

“Okay,” she nods finally, seeming to accept the angel’s promise of safety, “okay. But…” She presses her lips together in hesitation; raises her hand to push her glasses further up her nose. “…this demon... they probably know about your… _connection _with Crowley. How can you be sure they’ll tell you anything?”

And it’s a valid question, it is. If Crowley has, indeed, been taken back to Hell, a demon, _any _demon who knows about his and Crowley’s relationship (and, after the notorious part the two of them played in thwarting the Apocalypse, and their subsequent very high-profile trials, that would literally mean _every _demon) wouldn’t pass up a chance to gloat in the face of Aziraphale’s loss. And Aziraphale would be a fool to hope that he could persuade or threaten them into giving up information about Crowley’s whereabouts. Not if, by refusing it, they can prolong both his and Crowley’s suffering.

Aziraphale knows that, and he is no fool.

That’s why…

“Oh, it won’t be _me_ interrogating him,” he states, mouth twitching into a brief, almost smug grin at the twin expressions of confusion on the faces of his human companions. He raises his hand in the air, pulls it down with a quick, sharp snap, and grins wider still as the witch and her boyfriend take an equally quick, synchronous step back, staring up at him with a mixture of trepidation and awe.

“Wh-ho… what is this?” Anathema gasps out finally, waving her hand in his direction.

Aziraphale ignores the question at first. He rolls his shoulders, instead, cracks his neck, closes his eyes, letting himself get a better feel for the form he has assumed. Reaches up to pat the unfamiliar raised coiffure, smoothes his hands over a white neck scarf, over the lapels of a too-formal suit jacket.

“A disguise,” he answers finally, winking at the two of them from a now foreign face. “Someone I’m… fairly sure can get the right answers out of our future guest.”

He turns back to the summoning circle, hand raised in preparation. “I suggest you two hide,” he tells them as an afterthought as he snaps his fingers, the candles springing alight. “For the time being at least.”

And then he forgets about the two humans altogether, all of his attention focused on the center of the circle as he recites the words of the spell over and over and over, until a dark shape appears in a swirl of smoke, solidifying gradually into a familiar bleached-blond demon.

“Hello, Hastur,” he drawls out, sneering unkindly at the wary, wart-covered face. “Long time no see.”

“Michael?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale learns a few things...

Chapter 7

“What is the meaning of this?” the demon growls, slapping his hands angrily against the invisible barrier that surrounds him. 

The barrier holds, undisturbed, and Aziraphale’s lips twitch in minute triumph. “I need information,” he begins, fighting the urge to clasp his fingers in front of him as is his wont. He’s channeling Michael now, and Michael stands tall, confident, doesn’t fidget with her hands. Which means, Aziraphale can’t afford to either.

Hastur glares at him sullenly, fists pressed against the wall of power that entraps him. “And you couldn’t just go down to Hell like you normally do? You decided to opt for this… this… _travesty _instead?”

Aziraphale thinks back to his less than pleasant stint in the bowels of Hell when he was dragged down there disguised as Crowley, digs deep for the scowl of disdain he’s seen often enough on Michael’s face. “What makes you think I’d want to go back down to that overcrowded sewer any time soon?” He makes a show of brushing invisible dirt off the snow-white sleeve of his borrowed coat. “No, thank you.”

Hastur’s lip curls into a snarl. “Didn’t seem to bother you much when you came to us looking for that poison to take care of your _‘angel problem’,_” the demon throws up his hands in a mockery of air quotes.

It takes all of his willpower for Aziraphale to keep the disguise from slipping.

_Michael_, his mind spins feverishly, _it was Michael. Oh dear God…. _The knowledge, the very _thought _that an angel, an _archangel_, was responsible for this! That an archangel would stoop so low – to literally go down to Hell – just for the sake of settling an old score with him! It rattled him, hard – a violent electric shock deep through his very core. _How could she? How could any of them?_

“So what is it now?” the demon’s voice cuts through the churn of his distressed thoughts, bringing him back to the here and now. He needs to focus, dammit. Crowley’s life’s at stake! “Did the poison not work?”

“No, no,” he manages, forcing a grimace of a smile onto thin, gold-speckled lips. “It did wonders on that traitorous angel. He’s no longer a problem for us.”

“What _is_ then?” Hastur barks out, impatient.

“Crowley,” the angel states, fighting to keep his expression neutral. Because as desperately as he needs to know where his demon is, he can’t afford to slip up now, can’t let Hastur catch even a whiff of his desperation. “I was hoping to use the rest of that cursed potion on the demon – two birds, one stone kinda thing – but I can’t seem to find him anywhere,” he continues, aiming for somewhere between bored indifference and mild annoyance. “I was hoping maybe you, lot, knew something of his whereabouts?”

Hastur glares at him silently for a long moment, black eye unblinking behind the thick transparent wall, and then suddenly, inexplicably begins to laugh.

“Care to let me in on the joke?” Aziraphale snaps, the demon’s laughter grating on his already too-too frayed nerves.

The slightly hysterical, high-pitched laughter ceases as abruptly as it starts, but the demon doesn’t speak for a long moment, observing the disguised angel before him with an unsettlingly triumphant looking snarl.

“Some of us have been making bets Down Below if you, white-feathered freaks, knew anything about it,” he drawls out finally, the snarl growing wider, and impossibly more smug. “Guess Dagon owes me a month of sewage cleanup.”

“You’re trying my patience, demon!” Aziraphale steps flush to the barrier, one hand raised in warning. “Explain yourself. Now.”

The unequivocal threat works like a bucket of cold water poured over the head. The demon stiffens, his grin fading as pitch-black eyes flash nervously to the raised appendage. “Alright, alright,” he grumbles with feigned annoyance, “don’t get your feathers in a twist.” His mouth twists as if he had just swallowed something entirely too bitter, and he spits out a reluctant, “He’s Downstairs, the Serpent. We have him.” Promises, his face morphing into a cruel, bloodthirsty moue, “And he won’t be getting out this time either. Not with everything his _Brother _has planned for him.” 

Aziraphale huffs out a breath – relief mixed with worry. Crowley is alive, he knows that much for certain now. But how bad are his injuries? What exactly have the demons done to him? How will Aziraphale be able to find him in that mildew and sewage smelling maze.

And then his mind catches up to the last bit of what Hastur has said. 

And grinds to a halt.

“I’m sorry…,” he blinks at the demon, too stunned to try and hide his confusion, “his… _what_?”

Hastur’s grin is back, as smug as ever, if a bit tempered by the obvious unease at the angel’s closeness. “That’s right,” he murmurs, almost crowing with delight, “you, lot, don’t know.” A blackened tongue flicks out to run with perverted pleasure over the thin lips. “He ain’t a demon anymore. Don’t know how it happened, don’t really care, but his demonic essence…,” Hastur makes a poof! gesture with his hands, “gone! He’s one of yours now. An _arch-_angel. Ra-pha-el,” he adds mockingly, “according to our Master, at least. And our Master is never wrong.”

“A demon can’t… that’s… that’s not possible….,” the quiet gasp leaves Aziraphale’s mouth unbidden, his composure faltering. Because… because… it’s crazy is what it is. There’s no way that–

“Should have been, yeah,” Hastur agrees, smiling wider now, emboldened by the angel’s obvious fluster. “Whatever did that to his essence, should have destroyed him completely, but the bastard must have been clinging to his past self harder than any of us, so that… that…,” the demon’s mouth twists with disgust, “_angelic_… core was still buried underneath.” His cheek twitches, an expression of open revulsion crawling onto his face. “Always knew that snake was a traitor!” He spits – a gooey black glob landing at his feet. Huffs out something close to a laugh, winking conspiratorially at Aziraphale, “But at least now we know why holy water didn’t harm the bastard, eh, Michael? Not that it’s been any help to him now.” 

The unconcealed glee in the demon’s voice is the last straw. 

Aziraphale doesn’t realize he’s moved until he finds himself with a fistful of a squealing and wildly struggling demon, slightly singed for having been unceremoniously dragged through the active (and resisting) barrier. 

“You’re lying!” he growls out, shaking the demon as if he were a sack of potatoes, his free hand manifesting the flaming sword without conscious thought. “You’re lying, and I’m–”

“I’m not! I’m not, I swear!” Hastur yowls in fear and pain, squirming in the angel’s grip as he tries to shy away from the holy flames that burn uncomfortably close to his face. “Look… look in my memory!”

Aziraphale stares at him a heartbeat longer, then shoves him down on his knees, releasing his grip on the demon’s clothes. Lowers the flaming sword to point it at the demon’s neck. “Don’t move!” And presses the fingers of his left hand against Hastur’s forehead.

Images flood into his mind in rapid succession: the vengeful, angry twist of Satan’s face as he holds Crowley in the air, his body twitching feebly, pierced through with a line of unnaturally long, razor-sharp claws; Crowley in a cell – beaten, stabbed, burned, the cycle repeating itself over and over like a broken record on a never-ending loop; Crowley with his skin flayed like a cut up paper garland; Crowley crying in pain as the hands Aziraphale recognizes as Hastur’s rip viciously into Crowley’s wings – white, so impossibly, so incredibly white – and twist and bend and break them beyond all recognition, Hastur’s voice mocking his pain from somewhere off-screen….

He gasps, stumbling back a step, eyes wide with the horrors of what he had just seen. A red haze descends upon his vision – a blinding, all-encompassing wave of righteous fury, the likes of which he has never felt before. He’s shaking, he realizes. Trembling all over. And he can’t breathe. He can’t bloody breathe!

“Well?” Hastur’s words reach him as through a thick wall of fog, and he blinks, forcing himself to focus on the leering, expectant face. “You believe me now? You approve of how we’re handling your ‘second little problem’? Is it–”

The hand holding the sword swings out, and the rest of Hastur’s words die out, choked off on a quiet, helpless gurgle.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

A few moments after all the sounds in the adjacent room seem to die down, Anathema finally gathers the courage to step out of her hiding spot in the kitchen and slide cautiously into the living room, Newt following hot on her heels. She heard… _some _of what the demon had said, though it didn’t quite make sense to her. But it was the angel’s reaction to the demon’s words that truly got to her – the raw, unbridled fury in his voice she didn’t think him capable of; the seismic shockwave of it rolling through the cottage like a hurricane-force wind, knocking out light bulbs and rattling windows and doors. 

It was terrifying. And she wasn’t sure she was ready to face whatever the consequences of that fury left behind.

Turns out, she was right, but not for the reasons she thought.

The smell hits her first – burned flesh and rot, emanating from a blackened puddle on the floor just outside the now extinguished demon trap. She doesn’t understand the meaning of it, not at first. Not until she shifts her gaze to the angel, back in his familiar shape now, standing at the very edge of the still-smoking puddle, with his head low, his shoulders hunched, and his hand gripping a vaguely familiar sword engulfed in flames.

“Holy Belladonna…,” she gasps out, and the angel startles at that, turns around to face her, sword at the ready.

There’s a moment of shocked silence as he stares at her, eyes glazed with darkness and pain so palpable that she has to fight the urge to shy away from that gaze, to retreat back into the kitchen and stay there until the suffocatingly terrifying swirl of emotions she feels emanating from the angel settles down.

The angel blinks, slow and dazed, as though coming out of a trance, and the sword clatters to the ground, breaking the silence, the flame going out the instant it touches the floor.

“They have him,” comes the equally dazed, quiet revelation. “Hell… They have Crowley.”

Anathema flicks her gaze to the gooey puddle beside the angel, purses her lips in doubt. “_He _told you that?”

The angel shakes his head, swallows with visible effort. “Showed.” 

There’s something in that admission, in the way his voice catches and breaks on the word that sends a jolt of compassionate worry through Anathema’s heart. She dares a step or two closer, hovers almost within reach.

“He’s alive then,” she tries for comfort. “We know for sure now that he’s still alive. That’s a good thing, right?”

The angel’s face twists in a terrifying display of raw, unadulterated pain. “You don’t understand!” 

The grief in his voice is once again a powerful, physical thing. It pushes against Anathema’s senses, and she can’t help but recoil from the sheer force of its pressure. 

The angel doesn’t seem to notice. Stands where he is, hands gripping the sides of his head as if to keep it from splitting open, and words pour on, disjointed and rambling.

“He’s an angel now. The poison he absorbed, the poison he took from _me_ – it destroyed his demonic essence, burned it away. It should have… it should have killed him. Permanently. Because once you destroy a demon’s essence, there’s nothing left. Same with angels. But Crowley, he…” Tear-bright blue eyes find Anathema’s, and he smiles, bitter and wistful, “he’s different, isn’t he. Always has been.”

“He kept his angelic essence,” the guess spills out of her in an awed gasp. Because she’s read about the Fall, alright? She got curious after the failed Armageddon, she wanted to know more about the forces that started it all. And there was a lot of squabbling and disagreements between the different accounts she’s seen, but the one thing they all seemed to agree on was that the Fall was painful and traumatizing for the future demons and that the process burned away all traces of their former angelic essence, everything that ever tied them to Heaven. The mere idea that one of those fallen angels could somehow manage to save even a spark of that heavenly connection within them… it was… it was…

“Ineffable,” the angel breathes out, as if reading her thoughts, his smile wobbling as tears spill down his cheeks.

“It’s still a good thing, is it not?” Newt chimes in from behind her, and she jumps, having all but forgotten about his presence. “I mean, if he hadn’t, he’d be dead now, but this way we can still get him back, right?”

Aziraphale blinks at the question and looks away to where the demon’s remains slowly congeal into a cold viscous mess. And there’s that wave of pain again that rolls off of him, tinting his aura a sickly mustard yellow.

“I’m guessing an angel trapped in Hell is never a good thing,” Anathema muses, thinking back to the confrontation at the Tadfield Air Base, remembering the open rage and hatred she felt pouring off Crowley’s demonic colleagues. She remembers something else, too: the cold, ugly swell of deadly menace from both the demon with a fly-shaped hat on its head and from Satan himself, both directed at Crowley. _“Traitor,” _the fly demon had called him. And, _oh_, she thinks. _Oh!… _

“It’s worse for Crowley, isn’t it,” she blurts out, trying for gentle, but not quite succeeding, judging by the way the angel flinches at her words. And she gets it now, the reason for Aziraphale’s distress. Because… “They were already angry at him in Hell, weren’t they? For messing up their plans? And now they get their hands on him and he’s an angel…”

“Archangel,” Aziraphale speaks up finally, voice hollow and bitter with pain. “Raphael. Lucifer’s baby brother.”

_Oh… my…_

“He was tortured!” Aziraphale whirls back toward them, eyes blazing with self-directed fury. “All this time. All the time I’ve spent feeling sorry for myself, moping around this place like a goddamn fool. He was _tortured_, and I… oh dear God!” He pales, hand clamping over his mouth as he looks for all the world like someone about to get violently sick.

“You didn’t know!” Anathema tries. “How _could_ you? We all saw what happened, we all assumed that he was–”

The angel shakes his head. “Crowley would have known,” he forces out, strangled. “He always… he always… He would have _known_!” His words break on a pulse of guilt and self-hatred so strong – it physically pushes Anathema back a step. And then it dies out, just as quickly as it came, leaving behind a swirling murky sea of weariness and despair. “I gotta get him out of there…”

“Yes,” she nods, still feeling quite off-balance from the whirlwind of powerful dark emotions radiating from the angel. “But how?”

The angel shakes his head, forehead creased in thought. Murmurs a quietly helpless, desperate, “I… I don’t…”

“Um… I hate to bring this up,” Newt cuts in again, “but don’t we need to do something about this?” He points warily at the puddle of demon goo on the floor. “I mean… you said yourself he was a… a duke or something. Wouldn’t the others be expecting him back?”

Aziraphale’s head shoots up at that, face brightening unexpectedly, eyes gleaming with almost childlike excitement. “That’s it!” he cries out, reaching his hands toward Newt as though aiming to embrace him. 

“What?” The younger man stumbles back instinctively in the face of the angel’s near-manic fervor. Reaches up to fix his glasses in an awkward attempt to maintain his cool. “What did I say?”

Instead of a response, the angel snaps his fingers, and Anathema sucks in a startled breath as the angel’s form shifts once more: the white hair lengthens, the soft curls straightening out into an unruly tangled mop; the smooth perfect skin darkens and sags, breaking out in ugly, weeping warts; the bright angelic blue of his eyes disappears in the pools of seemingly bottomless inky black…

“Holy shit…,” Newt gasps out beside her, and, _yeah_, she thinks, as she watches the newly-baked demon roll his shoulders, adjusting the hopelessly stained, worn-out trench coat on his shoulders, _that pretty much covers it._

The disguised angel smiles at them, revealing a row of rotten smoke-yellowed teeth. Twirls around for good measure, arms spread out wide, as if inviting them to appraise his newest form. 

“I’ll be back soon,” he promises, and now, despite his earlier distress and confusion, despite the ever-present pain in his aura, he exudes nothing but frighteningly calm, furious conviction. “Bring Adam here if you can and have him wait for me.” At Anathema’s questioning frown he explains, “He helped me once, when my old corporation was destroyed. I’m hoping he can do the same for Crowley.”

And with that and another flick of his fingers he’s gone.

***

Hell is different from the last time he remembers. For one, his return is not greeted by any special fanfare. There are no demon guards surrounding him, tracking his every move. No hungrily leering gawkers crowding the hallways, their sharp teeth bared in anticipation of a good show. He walks through the damp, sewage-smelling hallways unhindered.

It’s a blessing on the one hand. On the other – he needs to find Crowley, and he has no idea where to go.

He gets lucky finally after yet another sharp turn into a winding corridor with a leaking overhead pipe that a couple of low-rank demons are lazily trying to patch up. 

_Perfect._

Shoulders squared, mouth set in a haughty disgusted sneer he’s seen Hastur wear on numerous occasions, he strides purposefully right up to the pair, growling out a “What the Heaven are you two, idiots, doing here?” in lieu of a greeting.

The demons turn around, startled, their grime-smudged faces frozen in fear. Stare back at him in a helpless flounder.

“Well?” He lets his frustration and worry seep through, disguised as anger. Lets the threat of it flash in the blackness of his eyes. “Why aren’t you over there guarding that traitor Crowley?”

One of the demons, a squatty wart-covered thing, stammers out finally, “Not… not supposed to be there, Your Lordship. It’s Armaros’ turn now. And I think… I think they may be waiting for you?” The demon ducks his head immediately, perhaps fearing he’d spoken too freely.

Aziraphale narrows his gaze, aware that on Hastur’s face it looks menacing enough to cause the two demons to cower and tremble before him. He uses that fear to his advantage.

“Take me to him,” he says, and when the demon hesitates a fraction, giving him a look of scared confusion, he snaps, teeth bared in a clear show of menace, “NOW!”

The demon jumps forward as if shocked and scurries obediently down the hallway, careful to stay only a couple steps ahead. Pauses in front of a thick metal door whose surface is dented in places and smeared with grime. 

“Armaros has been working on ‘im for the past couple hours,” the demon reports with a tremulous smile. “But ‘e should be good and ready for you now. You want me to announce you?”

“Leave!” Aziraphale growls, barely restraining himself from pulling the flaming sword back out of the hidden plane and running the bothersome demon through. Crowley is there, behind the door. He can feel him – the familiar tug he’s learned to hone in on over all those millennia. And he needs to get to him. Can’t afford to give himself away just yet.

The demon gulps nervously and is gone faster than could be expected from a short-legged creature like that. 

Aziraphale yanks open the door and steps inside.

For a moment – a long breathless moment – everything stops, as he stands, frozen, on the threshold of the makeshift torture chamber, its air so thick with the scent of blood and sweat and despair that it makes him want to gag. He thought he was prepared, he’d glimpsed some of what was awaiting him in Hastur’s memories, and he tried to mentally steel himself for this very moment.

It turned out to have been a futile endeavor. Because nothing, _nothing_ could have possibly prepared him for this!

He sees Crowley, hanging by his wrists from a spiked metal chain that cuts ruthlessly into the tender skin; rivulets of blood – angel-gold blood – trickling down the skinny trembling arms from there the barbs pierce the wrists, sliding past the awful looking bruises and welts that cover every inch of those arms to drip in a monotonous cadence down to the floor, where they merge with a much bigger puddle that has collected at his feet. He sees those bare feet, burned and bloodied, barely scraping the cold surface of the floor – not enough, not nearly enough to provide any support for his sagging body; Crowley’s head hanging limply on his scourged chest, the beautiful sun-red hair dull and matted; his beautiful wings – horribly mangled and torn, sticking out at awkward, broken angles, vulnerable and unprotected behind his back…

There’s a loud roar in his ears, an awful pressure in his chest – so strong he thinks he might burst from it. And for one horrifying moment his vision goes dark, as though someone somewhere had just turned off the light.

“Hastur!”

The raspy gleeful voice pulls him out of the suffocating blackness of his stupor and he blinks to find a tall scraggy demon, whose presence he had previously ignored, stepping out from behind Crowley’s back, one of its many unnaturally long, clawed appendages curled around the handle of a knife steeped in angelic blood.

“It’s about time you showed up,” the demon continues, a lewd smile pulling at his blackened lips. “I’ve been getting quite bored here. There’s only so many notches you can make on those wings before the blasted creature passes out on you, and then you have to wait for him to wake up. And waiting’s no fun, if you know what I mean.” 

The demon looks back at his prisoner, pretending to consider him a moment. “Perhaps I could wake him up for you now,” he offers with a laugh, low and grating. Grabs Crowley’s wing, pulling it sharply toward him, his knife hand poised to strike down.

And drops howling to the floor as the flaming sword slices through his appendages like a hot knife through butter, leaving behind blistering, sizzling stumps. The sword swings down once more, swift and vengeful, and the demon’s screams cut out, silenced into a dying fizzle.

Aziraphale doesn’t give him another glance. Steps forward instead, swinging his sword at the chain that binds Crowley in place. The Hell-forged shackles yield under the furious onslaught of holy energy, crack and shatter, scattering onto the floor in tiny smoking pieces. And Aziraphale lets go of the sword that same instant, lets it clatter to the ground unheeded, as Crowley, released from his cruel bonds, drops boneless toward the blood-covered floor.

Aziraphale catches him before he hits the ground, the momentum driving him to his knees. He lingers there just long enough to take a quick, relieved breath – perhaps his first one since crossing the threshold of this awful room. Then he stands, his precious burden cradled against his chest, his arms wrapped around him with the desperate protectiveness that’s tempered only slightly by his fear of causing Crowley more pain.

Crowley’s head lolls with the movement, a soft moan slipping past the cracked lips, and Aziraphale stills once again, breath bated as he waits hungrily, selfishly for more.

“Crowley?” he prods, realizing belatedly as the former demon jerks suddenly in his arms that the voice coming out of his mouth is still Hastur’s voice. 

And, oh, he wants to kick himself, wants to bang his stupid head against the wall for needlessly scaring his friend! He should have just kept his mouth shut. Just long enough to get them both out of here so he could shed this hated disguise. He should have–

Crowley shifts against him, effectively silencing his self-deprecating train of thought. Opens his eyes a slit, his bleary, pain-filled gaze skating slowly up Aziraphale’s face to rest on his eyes. And Aziraphale wants to close them, wants to keep Crowley from seeing those hateful soulless pools of black he knows are looking back down at him. 

But Crowley doesn’t flinch away. Stares mutely into Aziraphale’s eyes for a long breathless moment, and then, inexplicably, smiles. “Angel,” he exhales, his eyes slipping closed once more as his head rolls, his battered face nestling trustingly into the stained smelly material of Hastur’s coat.

It takes Aziraphale another interminably long moment before he can breathe again. Before he can blink away a veil of tears that washes out Crowley’s dear features and get his hopelessly rattled emotions under some modicum of control to snap the two of them back to the Jasmine Cottage, miracling the flaming sword away onto the hidden plane as an afterthought. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

A soft rustle of movement beside him breaks through the light doze he has finally allowed himself to sink into what seems like moments ago, and he startles awake, arms tightening instinctively around the stubbornly unconscious man-shaped being tucked safely against his side. He blinks, disoriented slightly from his not-quite-sleep, lets his bleary gaze focus on the young witch who stands less than a foot away from the bed, a tray of food in her hands. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, looking contrite, “I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ll just…” Carefully, she sets the tray down onto the nightstand beside him, moves to step back. 

“Don’t…,” Aziraphale raises a hand to stop her. “It’s okay. I wasn’t really asleep.”

She cants her head knowingly, her mouth tight with worried disapproval. “Perhaps you should be,” she chides. “You look absolutely beat.”

He believes it, too. He hasn’t had a moment’s respite since he popped back into Anathema’s living room with Crowley’s limp, mangled form cradled against his chest, shouting for Adam to encase the fragile, dying essence in a protective corporeal sheath – a temporary patch, a desperate attempt to keep the severely damaged essence from simply breaking apart in Aziraphale’s arms.

Since then, the only thing the angel was focused on was keeping Crowley alive and healing, healing, healing. Properly, thoroughly, completely. Determinedly undoing all traces of Hell’s purposefully, ruthlessly crude patch-up job: gently straightening out the twisted, crookedly knitted bones, mending the terrible scars that mar every inch of Crowley’s beautiful skin, soothing away the deep, devastating burns.

And it was working. Aziraphale could tell it was working. Could feel the broken, jagged edges of Crowley’s abused essence slowly, oh-so-slowly, pulling back together, its worryingly feeble glow becoming just a bit stronger in response to every pulse of angelic grace Aziraphale infused into it. And Crowley was blessedly, completely out of it throughout the harrowing procedure, remaining loose-limbed and pliant under the healing glow of Aziraphale’s hands.

Until Aziraphale started on his wings. 

He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the awful, soul-rending scream that tore from Crowley’s throat when Aziraphale hand first ghosted over one of the mutilated appendages in an attempt to infuse a bit of healing grace into the worst of the damage. He’d pulled back then, shocked to frozen horror by the tidal wave of pain and fear that crashed against his senses. It was… it was…

Aziraphale swallows down an uncomfortably human swell of nausea as he thinks back to those harrowing and seemingly endless hours of the night, during which Anathema and Newt stood on either side of Crowley, pinning him down on his stomach as he thrashed and writhed desperately in their grip, while Aziraphale himself, his corporation’s heart bleeding, ripping at the seams in the face of his friend’s interminable agony, wrestled the wildly flapping wings into submission one at a time, forcing as much healing energy as he could spare into each quivering appendage, trying his best to ignore Crowley’s raspy, throat-tearing howls of pain and the sobbing, gut-wrenching pleas for him to “stop, please, stop!”

And then came the nightmares. Vivid, brutal and just as relentless. And Aziraphale was helpless against them. Helpless to calm the wild, defensive flail of the long limbs. Helpless to soothe the pained furrowing of the sweat-stained brow, the quiet, pitiful whimpers and full-on wretched sobs. Helpless to chase away whatever awful images that passed before Crowley’s wide open but unseeing stare, as his friend screamed himself hoarse into the haunting void visible to him and him alone. Helpless to do anything but sit there with silent tears streaming down his cheeks and his trembling arms wrapped around Crowley’s guitar-string taut, twisting form as tightly as he dared so as not to hurt him and to keep Crowley from further hurting himself.

He never felt more exhausted in his life.

And yet he didn’t dare leave. Didn’t dare step away even for a moment lest Crowley should fall prey to another vicious nightmare. Or, worse yet, lest he should awaken and find himself alone. Aziraphale couldn’t do that to him. Not after everything that dear boy has been through for his sake. 

And so even now with the near-overwhelming and heretofore unfamiliar to him urge to sleep, he politely declines Anathema’s offer to keep watch over Crowley so he could go to the spare bedroom and rest.

“I’m sorry, my dear girl,” he shrugs, apologetic, shifting to pull Crowley closer as if afraid that she would physically try and force them apart. “I… I can’t.”

She shakes her head at him with the chiding look of a mother disappointed in her child. Concedes with a sigh, moving as if to leave. Then pauses, her gaze lingering on Crowley’s slack features. “It’s strange,” she muses, almost too quiet for Aziraphale to hear. “He doesn’t look much different.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh,” she looks back up at him, flustered. Shrugs, gesturing awkwardly toward Crowley, “I just… I mean… I know Adam gave him his old body back, but I thought… with him being an angel now and everything… that he would…”

“Look different?”

She purses her lips, sheepish. Reaches up nervously to tuck a stray lock behind her ear. “The other demons I saw, they… well, they all looked and felt very different from the angels. Their appearance, their auras. So I thought that he’d feel different, too, now, but… he doesn’t really. I mean… his eyes are different now and all, but he… he feels the same. Do you know what I mean?”

Aziraphale nods, smiles wistfully, looking down at the man in his arms. “I met him before, you know,” he murmurs, a seeming non sequitur that she frowns at, confused. “Raphael,” he adds in lieu of explanation. “Before the Fall.”

“You knew him?” And he can feel the weight of her stare on him, the shocked judgment of her realization. “Then why didn’t you–” She stops short, hand flying up to cover her mouth before she says too much.

But it doesn’t matter. He knows what she’s thinking. Lord knows, he’s been thinking the same thing ever since he saw those images in Hastur’s head. Has been judging himself for that ever since, too.

“Why I didn’t recognize him?” He looks up to find silent confirmation in her expression. Huffs out in tired self-condemnation, “I forgot.” And that’s as simple an answer as he can give her. As truthful as it is damning. “I’m pretty sure none of us were supposed to keep any memories of the Fallen. They were… some of us were very close back in those days. Brothers, sisters, best friends. Having the memory of those we’ve lost that day, it… it would have caused quite a lot of grief, I imagine.” His lips twitch, morphing into a bitter smirk, “Perhaps She was afraid that it would lead to more unrest.”

“But you’re remembering now?”

Aziraphale hums, raising an eyebrow in contemplation. “Not… all of it,” he admits reluctantly, “not exactly. Just… flashes, really. Random bursts of images… feelings… impressions.” He shrugs, a bit helplessly, “It’s… it’s hard to explain.”

She nods mutely, seeming to accept his jumbled explanation. Perches cautiously on the very edge of the bed. “So what do you see?”

There’s a prickle in Aziraphale’s eyes, a too-too familiar burn, and so he raises his gaze to the ceiling in a vain effort to contain the traitorous gathering moisture. “Light,” he whispers, unable, unwilling to keep the awe from his voice. “Beautiful and mesmerizing… like the stars. And kindness,” he adds, his voice trembling just a bit, “So… _so_ much kindness and love! I don’t think I’ve felt that much from any other angel.” He blinks, shifting his gaze back down to Anathema. Smiles brokenly as he feels a tear spill over his eyelashes to drip onto his cheek. “Perhaps that’s why he managed to hold on to it? He had so much of it within him that the Fall simply couldn’t burn all of it away,” he muses, as more tears follow down the same track.

It feels right, what he’s saying. Feels true. And he knew the truth of it, for thousands of years he knew. Had seen it in the begrudging care with which Crowley treated those around him; in the compassion (no matter how desperately, but, ultimately, poorly, hidden) that he exuded towards humans; in the untainted, gentle affection he showed towards Aziraphale himself.

But Aziraphale rejected it. Pushed that truth away, buried it under layers upon layers of denial, relying on blind obedience and mindless indoctrination instead of allowing himself to open up and see proof of the opposite that was right there in front of him, centuries upon centuries.

What a fool he was. What a naïve, blind fool.

“So you’re right, my dear.” He forces another smile for Anathema’s benefit – a pale, trembling thing. “He really doesn’t look that much different because… because he never really changed that much.” 

He raises an equally trembling hand to swipe at his rapidly dampening cheeks before looking down to gaze with tearful fondness at the former demon asleep in his arms. Lovingly, tenderly, he threads his quivering fingers through the tangled, sweat-matted locks. Places a ghost of a kiss, soft and apologetic, onto the pale strip of skin where it meets the hair’s flame-red edge. Whispers, barely audible, “Did you, darling?”

Crowley’s face tightens as if in response, a deep furrow of pain cutting across the smooth skin of his brow, and Aziraphale reaches out, unhesitating. Presses his fingers over the crease, willing his own still healing-weary essence to release just a tad more of angelic grace. Slumps in grateful exhaustion as he watches Crowley’s pain-tightened features soften and go lax with proper, mending sleep. 

There’s a brief moment when he wonders if he should take Anathema up on her offer after all, to take a much needed break from his healing vigil and allow himself to rest, to give his own powers a chance to recharge. He opens his mouth, a humble request for Anathema to stay with Crowley while he follows Crowley’s example and lets himself relax into a blessedly restful slumber ready on the tip of his tongue.

And snaps it shut a mere heartbeat later as a powerful and dreadfully familiar presence rattles sharply against the protective network of wards surrounding the cottage. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for the long wait! Life's been a bit hectic lately and I haven't had much time to write. On the plus side, I believe there are only about two more chapters left after this one, so we're almost there :)

Chapter 10

He hasn’t really had time to plan out his actions. Hasn’t had time to worry about the fact that his own powers, already as depleted as they were from healing Crowley, would give him little to no advantage over whatever emissary of Heaven that had decided to descend upon their refuge of a home. All he knew was that there was an ethereal being outside, a potential threat to Crowley, and he reacted – instantly, instinctively. Entrusted Crowley’s sleeping form into Anathema’s care with a harsh, urgent whisper of “Stay here!” and miracled himself outside with a hurried snap of his fingers, his only thought, his sole objective – to keep Crowley safe.

And then he sees… _her._

And the world around him grinds to a sudden, screeching halt. And he feels momentarily frozen in place, a toxic solution of fear, shock and rage sluicing through his veins in a trail of liquid ice-cold fire.

“Michael…”

The archangel smiles in greeting – a chillingly unkind twitch of the thin gold-hued lips. “Hello, Aziraphale.” 

She sounds calm, as chill as the frigid indifference of her icicle-blue stare. But Aziraphale knows better now. He knows her duplicitous nature, knows the lengths she’s willing to go to, remembers the look of triumphant glee in her eyes as she stood there pouring holy water into a tub, savoring her part in Crowley’s destruction…. He’s pretty sure that if he had been paying closer attention to the little old lady that handed him the poisoned book, he would have seen the same gleeful look in her eyes as well. But he had been a fool then. A blindly naïve fool, lulled by the false sense of security that his and Crowley’s oh-so-clever switch had seemingly afforded them. That naïveté nearly cost him everything.

Yes, he knows better now. And he can see the fire of unquenched hatred behind the shield of deceiving indifference, the core-deep corruption in one of the supposed purest of beings. A thought occurs to him that, at her core, Michael’s essence might be just as black as any demon’s.

Well, no. Not any’s. Crowley’s was never black at all.

“You were told to leave us alone. Instead you try to murder me and then have the audacity to show your face here?” he growls out, reaching out into the ether with the pitiful shreds of his power to summon his long-abandoned sword. The weapon flickers obligingly into existence, the cold solidity of it thumping into the palm of his hand, and he nearly collapses under the weight of it as the additional drain of his power sets his world off kilter. He grits his teeth, gripping the sword tighter, sets his left leg back a stumbling half step to keep himself from falling. Hopes against hope that Michael doesn’t notice. “How dare you!”

The archangel doesn’t speak for a long time. Merely observes him in silence, cold blue eyes narrowing ever so slightly on his exhausted form, lips twisted in a knowing calculating smirk. It unsettles him, her stare. Makes him feel vulnerable, the threadbare state of his powers exposed, no matter how hard he’d tried to mask it. He should have expected it, really – Michael is a born soldier, and a damn good one. She smells her opponent’s weakness the way sharks smell blood in the water. But he’ll be damned if he’ll let her anywhere _near _Crowley again. He’ll fight her with everything he has, until he expends the very last bit of his essence. It’s the least he could do for Crowley…. It’s what Crowley has done for him.

Michael shifts finally – a lazy, unconcerned shrug. “I’ve heard rumors of your continued existence, and I wanted to see for myself if there was any merit to them,” she offers, unapologetic. Cants her head slightly, giving Aziraphale another assessing look, her face twisting into a moue of disappointment. “I can see now that my efforts were not as successful as I had hoped. Too bad, that.”

He shakes his head, incredulous. “You’re not even the least bit remorseful, are you. You… you’re an angel, for Heaven’s sake! How can you be so blasé about murder?”

“I don’t like to lose,” comes another callous shrug. The blue eyes darken almost imperceptibly, the thin, eagle-like features becoming even sharper, more predatory. “I especially don’t like to be made a fool of.” And the sheer intensity of hatred that rolls off of her as she says those words makes him fight the urge to take another step back.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he evades, trying for somewhere between innocently confused and nonchalant.

Michael’s sneer shifts into something of a predatory snarl. “Did you _really _think I wouldn’t find out? That I wouldn’t think to follow the two of you, to check the recordings?”

Confusion slips on an icy patch of terrified realization. “Re…recordings?”

“Earth surveillance files, Aziraphale. Surely you’ve known about those.”

He hasn’t, no, though he suspected something of the sort was possible. In hindsight, he should have been more cautious. Should have insisted that he and Crowley made their switch back in the relative safety of his bookshop rather than in the open air. But he was giddy with post-victory high, so sure they had left everyone in Heaven and Hell too terrified by their performance to seek them out again, that he didn’t even think about the possibility of someone _other _than humans watching their return into their respective corporations. 

Well, no matter, he tells himself, no matter. First things first. He needs to get Michael out of here… somehow. Needs to neutralize the clear and present threat to Crowley. Then, _THEN, _provided he survives, he’ll worry about any other agents of Heaven. Michael is here by herself. As far as he knows, she’s the only one who ever had direct contact with Hell, the only one (apart from himself) who ever went Below. It’s possible, then, that she’s also the only one in Heaven who knows about their switch. If that is the case, at the very least, it will buy him and Crowley some time before he can figure out how to erase the incriminating evidence from Heaven’s files.

“Well?” Michael steps forward, one thin, perfectly manicured eyebrow lifting in expectation. “Aren’t you going to try and weasel your way out of this? Or run away? Not that it’s gonna help you any.”

He rears back at the brazen insult, his cheeks flushing. Presses his lips together – a thin white line against a rush of anger that threatens to spill forth. “I believe personal insults are undignified for a _true_ warrior, Michael.” He doesn’t bother masking the scathing sarcasm of his words. Stands taller instead, his shoulders squared, the flaming sword gripped firmly in his hands. “More to the point, I assure you that I have absolutely no plans to run.”

“Oh?” There’s open mockery in the archangel’s voice now as she takes another measured step toward him. “What do you intend to do then, _Principality_? Fight me?”

His jaw ticks in annoyance at the feigned incredulity, but he doesn’t rise to the bait. Tries to remember instead everything he knows about sword fighting, everything he can recollect about Michael’s own fighting style specifically. Searches his memory for a pattern, a potential weakness he could exploit.

Michael watches him a moment longer, her lips twisting into a wide, predatory smile that betrays the deadly excitement that seems to thrum underneath her very skin. “Be careful, little angel,” she taunts. “That sword is big and sharp. Might cut yourself by mistake.” It is a jeer as much as it is a not-so-veiled threat.

Aziraphale responds with a sour twist of a smile of his own. “I appreciate your concern, Michael,” he tells her with forced calm, white-knuckled fingers tightening ever more on the handle, trembling with the fury of his grip. “But I’m afraid it might be a bit misplaced. May I remind you that this sword was given to me by the Almighty Herself? Even you wouldn’t presume to claim that She assigned Her posts lightly.”

Michael’s face morphs into something patronizingly disdainful. “You haven’t touched this weapon in over 6000 years, and you plan on going up against me?” A flash, and there’s a sword in Michael’s hand as well – a long, heavy blade engulfed in blue flames. “You know, a sword is only as good as the hand that wields it,” she pontificates, twirling the weapon with the casual, practiced ease as she advances slowly toward him. “And, as far as I know, the only things your hands have wielded over the past millennia were those human… _food things _and those stupid books of yours.”

The sword swings toward him suddenly in a brutal arc, and he barely has time to parry the blow, the cold sapphire blue crashing hard against the flame-warm gold. His knees threaten to buckle under the force of it, but he doesn’t let them, pushes his weight forward instead, against Michael’s weapon, forcing her back a step. 

And then barely has time to stagger out of the way as she lunges at him once more, her blade slicing through the air where his head had been only a fraction of a second ago. 

And the attacks keep coming, faster and faster, Michael’s blade cutting a deadly path toward him in a relentless flurry of hits. He deflects them as best he can, all thought of strategy wiped from his mind as his entire focus shifts to simple panicked defense.

“Sloppy,” Michael mock chastises as he puts his blade up at the last minute to awkwardly block a thrust that would have surely sliced right through him. “Very, very sloppy. Such poor form, Aziraphale. One would think you haven’t picked up a sword in years.” 

He bites his lip, ignoring the taunt and the laughter that accompanies it. Uses her moment of self-assured celebration to press his advantage. A riposte, and the archangel howls in anger and pain as the flaming sword cuts a fiery path across her left arm.

He isn’t afforded the luxury of celebrating that minor success.

Michael’s face twists in a rage-filled snarl, six enormous wings unfurling with a muffled pop behind her back, and then she swoops down on him, her sword singing through the air with ravenous, murderous delight.

His own wings out, he thrusts his blade up toward her, throwing all of his remaining strength into deflecting her furious attack. It’s not enough, and his arms tremble and give under the tremendous pressure. He cries out as sharp pain pierces his shoulder, his sword slipping from nerveless fingers to land in the dust at his feet. Stumbles, his traitorous leg going out from under him… 

And then he’s on the ground, his back and head smarting from the uncoordinated, unplanned tumble, as he blinks dazedly up at the blue-flamed sword raised above his head in preparation for a fatal blow. _This is it_, he thinks, his eyes squeezing shut on instinct as the weapon begins its deadly descent. 

_“Forgive me, Crowley dearest. Forgive me.”_

“STOP!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi to me on [tumblr](https://somethingjustsouthofbrilliance.tumblr.com)


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

It is a myth that the Fallen don’t remember their lives in Heaven. They do. They simply choose not to. Because it hurts, the memory of what there was Before, the memory of what they had, of what they lost, of how they got to where they were now. It’s part of their punishment – to be forever reminded of what they could have been had they not gone against Her. Like taking a disobedient puppy and perpetually sticking its little nose into the mess it unknowingly made. 

It. Bloody. Hurts.

So they chase those memories away. Block them, some with anger, some with hatred, some, like Crowley, with thoughts of something or someone else (like a certain soft-bellied angel with piercingly warm blue eyes and a fond, disarming smile). They are, for the most part, successful at that. 

But those memories are always there, buried just underneath the surface. Like a virus that lies dormant in one’s body, waiting for the opportune moment when that body is weakened by illness or stress (or by weeks of unimaginably brutal torture).

And then they strike.

***

Crowley dreams. 

He dreams of endless fields of vibrant green grass, soft as down feathers against his bare feet; of the dizzyingly bright palette of flowers, each with its own sweet scent – heady and overwhelming for some, faint and delicate for others. He dreams of the warm caress of the sun on his skin as he lies on that down-soft bed of green with his eyes closed, listening to the gentle rustle of the breeze in the trees above, feeling the brush of its breath on his sun-kissed cheeks, its playful tug on his long flame-red curls.

The scene changes, and there he stands under the leafy dome of a sprawling fig tree, listening in contemplative silence as Lucifer lectures a group of angels on the benefits of having a choice. Questions begin to swirl in his mind. Questions he doesn’t dare voice for the longest time. Until they grow and multiply and become impossible for him to ignore. Until the need to speak those mutinous doubts out loud becomes so overwhelming, he feels that if he holds them in any longer, he would burst. So he lets them out, releases them toward Her like a flock of timid, unsure fledglings, and it feels glorious. It’s dizzying, the relief of it. As if an impossibly tight band that had been holding his chest in a crushing vise has snapped and he could take his first proper breath in what felt like forever. He feels unburdened finally, free – his whole being so much lighter now for having lost the weight of those questions that he feels like he could float straight up into the air and soar higher than everyone else.

Little did he know that She, instead, would make him Fall.

He’s back in the field again, but it looks different now. Everything is different. Gone is the sun, the brilliant blue of the sky clouded over with ominous steel-like gray. Gone is the gentle breeze, the air unnaturally still and thick with foreboding. No sound is heard but the sharp clanging of swords and the awful screams of the wounded and the dying. The grass beneath his bare feet is trampled and wet with blood.

He doesn’t have a sword, never felt the need for it. Still, he moves purposefully toward the horrific cacophony of battle, despite the unfamiliar, terrifying heaviness in his feet and his soul. He’s a healer, he was created to comfort, to mend, to soothe. His place is with those who need that the most. So that’s where he goes, weaves his way right into the midst of the fighting, his hands aglow as he gently pushes the combatants apart. And the weapons lower under the force of his suggestion, the murderous tension abating, a temporary lull in the fighting settling in his wake.

He tends to the wounded, kneels beside each one, mindless of the golden ichor that seeps into his clothes as he does so.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Michael’s voice is sharp, angry, and he looks up from where he crouches by the crumpled form of an angel, one hand still hovering over a deep, heavily bleeding gash across the being’s chest, the edges of it knitting slowly together under the healing glow of his grace. He frowns worriedly at his sister’s rumpled appearance; at the wild, flaming eyes, the bared teeth, the disheveled hair, the golden stains that mar her normally impeccable white robes – blood, angelic blood. There are drops of it in Michael’s hair, too. A smudge of it across her cheek. Her sword is coated in it, gold droplets dripping from the naked blade. 

It makes him feel ill.

“I’m a healer,” he reminds her, failing to hide a note of reproach at the unseemly violence of her image. “This angel is hurt, and I’m doing what I can to–”

“By my hand, Raphael!” Michael interrupts in an indignant growl, and he recoils, appalled by the open fury of her outburst. “This traitor took up arms against Her army, and he was struck down for it.” She jabs her weapon in the direction of the prone figure, and Raphael moves instinctively to place himself in the path of the blood-coated blade, even as the angel he’s shielding attempts to hunch in on himself, wide, terror-filled eyes riveted to the blue-flamed sword. Michael’s lips twist with displeasure at his protective gesture, blue ice darkening with disappointment. “You would do well to stay away from him, little brother.”

The underlying threat in her words is undeniable, and it stuns him, echoes unpleasantly deep within his very core. He’s never been good at obeying the orders from others, however. He followed those of his heart instead, the little voice that pushed him to do what felt right. He does so even now. Rises to his feet slowly, brows pulled together in a frown of disapproval. Makes sure to stand firmly between Michael and the wounded.

“Or what?” he challenges, using his slightly taller form to tower over her, knowing full well how much it irritates her when he does that.

Blue eyes narrow, sharp and ice cold, the muscle in her jaw tightening in frustration. “Or you will be cast out with the rest of them,” she spits, and, Lord help him, he doesn’t recognize her, his sister. That animosity, that hatred – how could she? How could any of them?

“What’s happened to you?” he whispers, shaking his head in horrified wonder. “This isn’t right. You _know _this isn’t right. You must!” 

Despair floods his soul at the stony, unyielding expression that greets his words, and he twists away from her, turns his plea to the others on the battlefield instead. 

“Listen to me, all of you,” he shouts, his voice ringing above the din of the battle, sending a frisson of hesitation across the field. “These are your brothers and sisters that you are fighting! You’re spilling the blood of your kin! You understand that?” He pauses, chest heaving, and is gratified to see that some of the fighting has stopped, too, timid, unsure glances darting his way. He scans those faces, making sure to hold every one of those gazes. “This is wrong,” he insists, putting all of his conviction into the words. “You cannot _possibly_ believe that this is what the Almighty would have wanted.”

He raises his face to the sky that has been silent for far too long. He hates this. Hates that She hasn’t stopped this madness yet, hasn’t done anything to intervene. He doesn’t understand why. And it’s about time, he thinks, that he ask.

“Is it?” he challenges the silent firmament. “Is _this_ what You wanted? For your children to be killing each other? Is this part of your Great Plan?” 

Predictably, there’s no response, and to him that’s as good a response as any. He shakes his head, disenchanted, an unfamiliar, bitter feeling making his chest ache. “Well, it’s wrong!” he growls out, looking back out into the field. “You hear me, all of you? It’s wrong! You have to– gah!”

Sharp pain lances though his midsection, cutting him off mid-breath, and he folds in on himself with a startled gasp, hands going instinctively for the source of his agony only to recoil in trembling shock as his fingers brush against cold, hard metal. He looks down, noting dazedly the familiar blue-flamed sword sticking out of his stomach, the blood – his own, dimly registers in his mind – that seeps out around the edges of the blade. 

“Michael?” His voice trembles with the shock of pain and betrayal as he raises a disbelieving gaze toward her, hoping she would deny the reality of this somehow. 

But she avoids looking at him, even as she pulls the blade out, making him stumble forward on unsteady legs. Turns away as his legs fail completely and he sinks helplessly down to his knees.

“Put him with the others,” she tells the angels trailing behind her. 

Hands grab at him, obedient. Drag him unceremoniously over to the newly opened chasm, where a group of bound, battered angels is huddled in somber anticipation. His fingers itch to reach them, to soothe away the hurt and the worry he sees on their faces, but he finds he can’t do it, even though his hands remain free. He simply doesn’t have the energy for it, his mind is too heavy, his hands – too weak, trembling from pain and blood loss. He watches, numb with horror and grief, as, one by one, the so-called rebels are pushed off the platform into the bottomless abyss below. Doesn’t resist when his turn comes and a hard shove sends him careening over the edge.

The last thing he sees is a glimpse of Michael’s eyes, wide and haunted, as she looks down on him, and her hand, trembling, as she reaches up to swipe at something wet on her cheek.

He falls.

***

He jolts awake, the sensation of falling still all too vivid in his mind’s eye, and his wings flare open instinctively, seeking purchase, as his body trembles with both residual and remembered pain. There’s something solid underneath him, solid and silky and soft, and he digs his fingers into the silken tangibility of it, hanging on for dear life, lest it should melt away into the ether and he finds himself falling once again.

“It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re safe,” a voice soothes from somewhere off to the side, and he twists toward the sound, wide eyes darting wildly about until they settle on a dark green blob in the far corner of the room. 

He blinks, blinks again, waiting for the shape to come into focus. Squints distrustfully at the familiar delicate face framed with a wild mane of black curls, the big brown eyes staring fearfully at him from behind round horn-rimmed glasses.

_Book Girl. _But that’s impossible.He remembers… he remembers Hell and pain – merciless, all-encompassing, never-ending. He was delirious with it, swimming in and out of viscous, semi-coherent haze. And then… and then…

He was held! 

He remembers that suddenly – a vague recollection of being wrapped in something soft and warm, of gentle hands, of a soothing, dear voice…

“Aziraphale!”

He lurches up off the silky surface, bare feet slipping on the hardwood floor as he tries in vain to maintain his balance, his muscles still too weak, too unused to holding him up. Startles, jolting like a spooked horse, when a pair of arms wraps around his middle, preventing him from falling.

“Lie down,” the girl, Anathema, whispers in his ear, gently trying to push him back, “lie back down, it’s okay.”

He shakes his head in protest, wincing as the movement makes the room spin wildly around him, his legs sagging beneath him despite his best efforts to keep himself upright. Moans in frustration, slumping unwillingly against his human support as he tries to muster the energy to stand on his own.

“Where’s–,” he rasps out and stops, mouth snapping shut at the unmistakable surge of angelic power that rends the air outside – a crackling roar of celestial thunder.

Beside him the Book Girl stiffens, forehead creasing in worry. “You need to stay here,” she insists in lieu of a reply, and he knows, he just… knows.

He pushes against her, stumbling out of her grip. Staggers drunkenly toward the door, toward the flashes of ethereal power he feels coming from the outside. The door bangs open at the snap of his shaking fingers, and he freezes a half a step away from the threshold, his breath catching at the sight of his angel, his brave, beautiful, stupid angel, clashing swords with Her chosen Warrior herself. Stares, suspended in the web of his past, at the blue flames that engulf Michael’s sword, the memory and pain of their last encounter echoing so sharply in his chest that he feels as though he’s been struck again, folded in half under the blow of the merciless blade.

And then Aziraphale stumbles and falls, his own weapon dropping to the ground beside him as Michael raises hers above him, preparing to strike. And time restarts for him with a jolt, breath leaving his lungs with an agonized shout as he lurches toward them, pulling on every bit of power within his scarred, healing essence.

“STOP!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, now you know who cried "stop". The question now, I suppose, is how will the reunion go ;)  
Please let me know what you think in the comments - I love them, they're my favorite kind of candy


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, this chapter has been giving me the most ridiculous trouble. I sincerely hope the end result is palatable, because this chapter and I are not on speaking terms at the moment lol

Chapter 12

Aziraphale’s eyes fly open at the loud commanding shout that rends the air, the unexpectedness of it shattering violent tension of the moment like a pane of glass.

_No_.

He twists awkwardly in place, turning his aching head in the direction of the voice, one trembling hand reaching beseechingly back toward the cottage where a too-too familiar lanky figure stands, framed in the white-gold light of the doorway.

_No, darling, please, don’t…._

But Crowley isn’t looking at him, the fiery weight of his stare settled squarely on Michael’s face. And then he starts forward down the pathway, and Aziraphale can’t hold back an awed gasp. Because the light, the light that he had assumed was coming from within the cottage, follows with him. It pulsates, seeming to grow stronger, brighter with his every step, the even blanket of its glow disrupted every so often by an intricate dance of blindingly white, blazing sparks that appear to drip from Crowley’s flaming red hair. _Like stars_, Aziraphale thinks dimly.

“Raphael?” the uncharacteristically choked sound of Michael’s voice draws Aziraphale’s attention away from Crowley’s approaching figure and he glances up at his would-be executioner, startled by the look of disbelieving, almost fearful shock on her plaster-pale face. She makes as if to move toward Crowley, but falters, takes a step backwards instead, her sword hanging limply at her side, momentarily forgotten. “This isn’t… you… you’re dead….”

Crowley smirks, coming to a stop beside Aziraphale. “Exaggerated,” he offers with a shrug of feigned nonchalance. “The reports of my death. Greatly exaggerated.” He turns to Aziraphale who continues to stare numbly at him. Winks, conspiratorial. “That Samuel Clemens fella, remember him?*” Amber gold eyes bore into his, narrowed and intent, concern poorly concealed behind a thin veneer of amusement. “The one who dropped a watermelon on his friend’s head from a third storey window?** Ooh, I always loved his sense of humor.”

Aziraphale jerks his head sharply, forcing himself out of his temporary trance. Swallows past a too dry throat. “I always assumed the watermelon incident was your doing, my dear boy,” he rasps out, deciding, for the moment, to play along.

“Nah,” Crowley dismisses, his smile growing brighter, encouraged by Aziraphale’s cooperation. “I merely observed that a watermelon could have more than one use if one were not particularly inclined to eat it. Dear old Samuel came up with that particular use for it all by himself.”

“Well, no wonder he’s one of yours then.” The phrase spills out before he can catch himself, and Aziraphale’s eyes widen in fluster as he tries frantically to backpedal to a safer ground, “_Was_… that is to say… he _was _one of…” He stutters to a halt, his voice fading out to an embarrassed, “oh dear”.

“Don’t sweat it, angel.” But Crowley’s smile dims a bit, the already forced levity of his expression growing pained. “Once a demon, always a demon, ain’t that right?”

And, _“no!”_, Aziraphale wants to shout, _“it isn’t!” _ This wasn’t what he meant at all. 

Michael doesn’t give him a chance.

“That’s right,” she latches on, knowingly, deliberately cruel. Sneers at Crowley when he turns to acknowledge her, all tension and wariness once again. Goes on, her voice dripping venom. “No Fallen has ever been allowed to return, and you are no exception, _Crowley_. So whatever it is you’re trying to achieve with this disguise of yours, it’s not going to work. Mother would never–”

“Well,” Crowley interrupts, all bared teeth and sharp angles, “you know Mother. She always did have a funny sense of humor.”

“You rebelled against Her!” Michael raises her sword once more, eyes blazing with angelic, righteous fury. “You took up arms against your brothers and sisters…”

Crowley’s eyes narrow ever so slightly, his posture loosening with the calculated flexibility of a snake before the strike. “Funny,” he observes, calm, so, _so _deceptively calm, “that’s not how I remember it.”

“Perhaps your memory is a bit… rusty,” Michael suggests, like a spit of pure acid onto the packed dirt between them. “What with being a demon for so many millennia. All that sulfur and rot would have surely had an impact.”

Aziraphale’s lips pinch tight at the needlessly cruel mockery of Michael’s words, his whole being vibrating with the urge to jump to Crowley’s defense, to put Michael down on the spot, his own injury be damned. He moves to rise, trembling, fists clenched at his sides.

A staying hand on his uninjured shoulder holds him back.

“Oh, I think you’ll find that we, _demons_, have an exceptionally good memory when it comes to evil.” Crowley isn’t looking at him, his gaze locked firmly on the sword-wielding archangel before him, but Aziraphale can feel the worried tension in his friend’s hand, the warning weight of his grip that prevents him from standing.

“Evil?”

“Murder, Michael,” Crowley responds with nonchalance betrayed by the ever so slight tightening of the long thin fingers around Aziraphale’s shoulder. 

“Murder?” Michael reels back, as if shocked, thin eyebrows rising comically. “Really now! Why would you invent such a ridiculous thing?” Huffs out, all sanctimony and contempt, “Angels aren’t capable of murder. That is _your _prerogative. That’s why you and your lot Fell.”

“Funny,” Crowley remarks again, letting go of Aziraphale’s shoulder to take a step closer to Michael, who backs away a few steps in turn, her fingers tightening around the hilt of her sword. “I don’t recall seeing any demons in Sodom, when humans were being burned alive, or in Egypt when your lot were busy slaughtering infants.” He pauses, hands clenching briefly into fists at his sides, before he forces them to relax. Adds in a chiding, disappointed whisper, “Or That Day when you cut down your own brother for asking you to stop fighting.”

Michael’s face twists into an expression that resembles something like guilt. It’s gone, however, just as quickly as it had appeared. Smoothes back into the cold, determined unflappability of one who’s in the right.

“You were inciting a riot, Raphael,” she objects flatly, Crowley’s angelic name falling off her tongue with just as much disdain as his demonic one. “You were trying to get the other angels to question Her orders. I had no choice but to silence you.”

Crowley shakes his head, shoulders sagging with a tired defeat of a teacher disappointed in his imperceptive student. “She never ordered you to kill your brothers and sisters, Michael,” he points out, voice thick with bitterness and exhaustion. “She never ordered any of us. You _chose _to fight because you thought that it would please Her. But She never told you She approved of it, did She. She never said a word to any of us. You just… assumed.”

Michael’s chin juts out, stubborn. “She would have interfered if She didn’t think what I was doing was right.”

“Would She have?” Crowley cants his head a bit, watches her with something akin to pity. “She stopped speaking to us long before the Rebellion. I should know, I tried. For weeks. She never said a word.” He lets his gaze wander briefly upwards. Smirks, bitter, before looking back at Michael.

“I don’t know if She would have approved of what you were doing that day or not, sister,” he admits, leveling her with a dark, serious stare. “None of us do. But we had a choice. Every one of us. That’s what Lucifer and the others were talking about. A choice to follow or to lead. To obey or to rebel. To kill or to protect. That’s what I was doing, Michael. _Choosing_. Choosing to heal the wounded instead of picking up a sword and causing more suffering. Choosing to talk the others out of spilling any more of their brothers’ blood.” A breath and he adds in a thin, taut whisper, “And you chose to kill me for it.”

A shadow of hesitation flickers in the icy cold depth, thin lips wobbling and twisting as Michael struggles visibly to regain her footing, seeming uncharacteristically unsettled. But whatever doubts Crowley’s words managed to raise within her, she doesn’t let them linger. Shakes them off. Straightens her shoulders, her features smoothing out once more into a blank, emotionless mask. 

“I made the right choice,” she insists. “You lost your place in Heaven the moment you decided to question Her, and it was up to me to stop you. I don’t know what demonic trick you used to get this form back, but it’s an abomination that should never have been allowed to happen.” She lets the light of her Grace grow brighter as well, wraps both hands around the sword handle, raising the weapon to point at the former demon’s chest, “And I intend to put an end to it.” She nods dismissively toward Aziraphale. “And that.”

Aziraphale takes that for the threat it is. Scrambles to his feet to stand beside Crowley, his own weapon clutched in his hand. He may be swaying on his feet from pain and exhaustion, the blanket of his Grace nearly threadbare, but he’ll be damned if he lets the archangel hurt Crowley now. Crowley, who stands unarmed and seemingly undaunted before Michael, his only reaction to the archangel’s words – an angry tightening of his jaw. 

Aziraphale grips his sword tighter, steps forward, intending to place himself in front of Crowley, to protect him as best he can. In the next instant, a thin pale arm shoots out toward him, fingers wrapping tightly around his sword-wielding hand, and he is yanked forcefully and unceremoniously backwards. 

“You seem to be forgetting one thing about healers, Michael.” Crowley’s free hand glows briefly and a golden winged staff with two open-mouthed snakes winding their way around it weaves itself out of the ether to fit with dutiful, glove-like precision into his awaiting palm. “It takes a lot more power to repair the damage than it does to cause it.”

“Are you honestly trying to claim that you’re more powerful than me?” Michael’s aura spikes with incredulity and contempt. “Please! If that were true, I wouldn’t have defeated you so easily back then. Even that pathetic excuse for an angel you’ve got hiding behind you lasted longer against me than you ever did.”

Crowley barks out a sound too cracked and bitter to resemble laughter. “You didn’t defeat me then, Michael. You would have had to fight me and win to claim defeat. But there was no fight, was there? I wasn’t armed, I wasn’t attacking you or any of the other angels there. I was _speaking_ to them. And yet you stabbed me, underhandedly like a coward, just to shut me up. All because you were scared.”

There’s a deadly sort of calm to Crowley’s voice, sharp and metallic like the edge of a sword, but Aziraphale can feel the strain of exhaustion there, flickering just underneath the surface, echoing in the fine tremors that course through the delicately long fingers still curled painfully tight around his wrist. Cautiously, he places his other hand on them, gives them a hesitant, gentle squeeze.

“Crowley, dear, perhaps you should let me–”

“Scared?” Six wings flare out, their edges bursting into furious, blood-orange flames. 

“Yes, Michael. Scared,” Crowley repeats, unfazed, ignoring Aziraphale’s insistent tug. “Properly shit-in-your-pants terrified that others would listen to me and reject your call for senseless bloodshed, reject your leadership.” 

“How DARE–”

“And if you were so scared of the power of my words,” Crowley continues as if she hadn’t spoken, releasing his death grip on Aziraphale’s wrist to casually place his other hand on the staff, “the thought of actually fighting me must have you positively trembling with fear.” And Aziraphale can virtually hear the insolent grin in his voice as he concludes, “Quite rightly, too.”

Michael roars with air-shattering fury, her thin face twisting with it, becoming unrecognizable almost. Divine power flares around her in a rapidly expanding ball of hungry flames as she raises her sword for battle. She is truly terrifying like this – a burning pillar of divine Wrath and Vengeance. No creature can hope to resist her when she is like this, especially not a lower-ranking angel with most of his Grace depleted by his earlier exploits. Still he raises his sword in preparation as Michael leaps forward to attack, because there’s no way he’s leaving Crowley’s side now.

There’s a muffled pop and something soft but firm collides with his chest, knocking him backwards onto a bed of petunias*** that line the edges of the path just beyond the steps of the porch. Dazed he looks up, blinking rapidly at the white expanse of enormous star-dusted wings that have unfolded behind Crowley’s back, blocking his view of the two archangels. The light surrounding Crowley pulsates unsteadily – once and then again, flickering like a dying bulb, even as the flame-engulfed sword-wielding figure begins to descend upon him in a flare of pure fiery rage. 

Aziraphale shouts in desperate denial as he scrambles for the pitiful remains of his Grace, already knowing that he would be too late to stop the inevitable. He sees Crowley’s arms come up, the staff gleaming in the light of the flames as he uses it to block the deadly blow from Michael’s sword. The heavenly metal sings at the impact, Crowley’s arms trembling with the force of it. And then, just as Aziraphale reaches out to give Crowley everything he has left, Crowley pushes his staff up higher, throws his head back and screams, loud and hoarse and piercing – the agony of an exposed nerve strained to the point of breaking. His light wavers another fraction of a breath, blinks, and then explodes outwards in a blindingly intense, roaring supernova, whitening out everything around it.

When Aziraphale’s vision clears, it’s all over and Michael’s nowhere to be seen, and there’s only Crowley, crumpled in an awkward, motionless heap on the pathway in front of Anathema’s house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. The quote "the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" has been attributed to him. I got it into my head that someone with such a wicked sense of humor would have had to have gotten on Crowley's radar at some point, and I do believe they would have enjoyed each other's company (perhaps as a counterpoint to a certain angel's intriguing relationship with one Oscar Wilde ;-))
> 
> **True story, apparently. According to a collection of various anecdotes about Mark Twain, he, at one point, decided to play a practical joke on a friend of his by throwing a watermelon out of the (third-storey) window of his editor's office onto the head of that poor fellow who was standing right below it.
> 
> ***I cannot vouch for the presence of actual petunia flower beds in front of Anathema's cottage, but I have willed them into being for the sake of this story.
> 
> \----  
Please do be so kind as to let me know what you think of this chapter. My muse has been struggling lately, and a bit of a boost couldn't hurt (*turns on her best puppy dog eyes*)


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there. Hope everyone's staying safe these days. 
> 
> First of all, I apologize for the long wait. Writer's block is a terrible thing, whimsical muses are even worse.
> 
> Secondly, I know I said that there was going to be only one chapter left, but, seeing how this monster was already over 3100 words and nowhere near done, I decided to split it up a bit and make it more manageable. So there will be a (hopefully) shorter epilogue after this one.

Chapter 13 

“Crowley…”

He rolls onto his knees, cautiously this time, after his initial attempt to get up ended with him flopping backwards into the already doomed petunias. Plants both palms onto the trampled grass before him as his body threatens to pitch forward. Scrambles forward in a hurried lopsided crawl.

“Crowley! CROWLEY!”

The former demon doesn’t react to the increasingly frantic calls of his name. Doesn’t so much as twitch. Lies still and impossibly pale, twisted partially onto his side, arms and legs splayed out haphazardly – like a broken, discarded doll. The mental comparison makes something unpleasantly cold unfurl deep within his chest and he falters, his hand hovering above his friend’s body in trembling indecision before it settles with near weightless, desperate plea on the too-cold skin of his cheek.

“Wake up, Crowley, please…” His voice is barely above a whisper now – a cracked, pathetic thing. But somehow, miraculously, it gets through.

A shudder runs through the crumpled form, faint, imperceptible almost, the disheveled ginger head turning feebly into his touch, and Aziraphale feels dizzy with relief when the paper-thin eyelids flutter open with great effort, two slivers of honey gold peeking out.

_Thank God, thank God, oh, thank God!_

He lurches forward with a strangled sob, both arms wrapping around the former demon’s shoulders, as he pulls him up into his chest, burying his face in the tangled, flame-red strands. Takes a moment to breathe in the scent of his beloved; to feel him – yes, weak, terribly, _frighteningly_ weak, sagging will-lessly in Aziraphale’s embrace, but solid and tangible and _alive!_; to calm his foolish corporation’s wildly racing heart.

And then reality closes in, and he remembers how vulnerable they both are, sitting powerless in the middle of the unwarded yard, how wholly, how uncomfortably exposed. Reluctantly he pulls back, places one hand back on Crowley’s cheek, gently upturning his face. Waits for the bleary gaze to settle (albeit unsteadily) on his own.

“Do you think you can stand up with me, dearest?”

Crowley blinks mutely at him, brow furrowed as though he’s trying and failing to parse the meaning of Aziraphale’s words.

“Please, my dear. I’m afraid I’m not strong enough to carry you and staying out here… well, it’s not safe. If Michael should return–”

“She won’t.”

There’s a calm, definitive kind of certainty in the softly murmured words, and for a brief moment it fills Aziraphale with dread. “You… you killed her?”

He doesn’t know why the thought bothers him so much. It’s not as though Michael didn’t deserve it.

Not as though he wasn’t prepared to destroy the archangel himself mere moments ago. And yet, somehow, the idea that Crowley might have done it fills him with dread.

Crowley’s frown grows deeper, the bleary amber gaze sharpening for a brief moment – the flash of understanding giving way to a shadow of disappointment. “Healed,” he murmurs finally, and, before Aziraphale has a chance to ask him what he means by that, his eyes slip closed once more and his head lolls forward, his forehead bumping into the crook of Aziraphale’s neck.

“Oh, dear.”

He looks around, his desperate gaze falling onto the open doorway, where Anathema stands, watching the two of them with obvious apprehension. He latches on to her presence like a drowning man. “Help us,” he pleads, voiceless. “Help us, please.”

She and Newt are both there the very next instant, as though his plea was the permission they’ve been waiting for. Crowley is lifted, gently, reverently almost, out of his arms, and he is left to watch in dazed worry as, between the two of them, the humans half-drag, half-carry Crowley back into the house. A few minutes later Newt comes back out to where he sits slumped on the grass in bone-deep exhaustion and hauls him just as gently to his feet. 

“Come on,” he says. “Crowley’s in bed, asleep. Anathema says you need to be doing the same.”

And, yes, quite, he thinks as the landscape rocks and swims around him, his weight sagging more and more into Newt’s side. He couldn’t agree more.

***

A presence nearby, warm, comforting and familiar. Gentle fingers ghosting over his temple, carding lightly through his hair. 

They call to him. A faint but insistent tug on his abused, exhausted essence, urging it out of the viscous, pleasantly numbing cocoon of darkness.

The darkness resists, wrapping its inky, gelid tentacles tighter around his weary form, sucking him in deeper, and deeper, and deeper. _Stay here_, it whispers, seductive and sibilant. _No one will trouble you here. Stay hidden, stay safe._

The press of the fingers becomes more urgent, a voice, kind and soothing, joins in, doggedly demanding his attention. “Wake up, darling,” the voice encourages softly, fingers tracing a careful pattern along his jawline, lingering with a light tremble just shy of his lips. “Come back to me. Please.”

The voice trembles, too, he realizes, the quietly spoken words are steeped in a thick treacle of worry. And it’s that worry, that strain, that _wrong, wrong, wrong _quiver in the gentle, angelic… (angelic?)… voice that tears him out of the smothering, clinging blackness, propelling him into wakefulness.

There’s a face above him, round and soft with a smile brilliant and warm like the sun, a cloud of white, fluffy hair, and the eyes – blue, blue, blue, like the sky. He remembers it, he knows it, he loves it.

“N’gel….”

A choked sound escapes the angel’s lips – something halfway between a laughter and a sob. The fingers resting lightly against his face startle and pull away only to grasp his hand instead, curling around it with near bone-shattering strength.

“Crowley! Oh, my dear. Oh, thank God!”

He cringes, a memory skittering across the slowly dissipating fog of blankness: a wordless, desperate plea in the moment of his darkest, deepest despair, when the pain of his endless, senseless torture had become too much for him to bear, when he wondered, again and again, why She hated him so. A plea for deliverance sent into the unresponsive, indifferent void where She used to be.

“Don’t,” he croaks, throat tight as much from disuse as from the emotions squeezing it. “Don’t bring Her into this. She….” _Left me_, he wants to say. _Stripped me to the core I never even knew I had and threw me to the mercies of Hell._

Aziraphale doesn’t seem to need him to say these words out loud. The relieved, radiant smile falls away, a deep frown settling across his features. “I won’t pretend to understand Her ways,” he admits, somber. “I know you feel that She treated you in the worst possible way, and I….” He breaks off, flustered, his lips twitching nervously. Drops his gaze down to where his hands are clinging to Crowley’s. Acknowledges in a strained, anguished whisper, “I can’t say I disagree.”

Crowley arches an eyebrow at that. “Better be careful with that kind of talk, angel,” he cautions, trying, unsuccessfully, to mask the bitterness in his voice with a healthy dose of sarcasm. “Mother’s got a vindictive streak the size of a small galaxy.” 

The angel shakes his head, his gaze still locked stubbornly on their interlaced fingers. Reiterates in a quiet but determined voice, “I believe She’s wronged you terribly, my dear boy, but…” He looks back up at Crowley, puzzled, uncertain. Chews on his bottom lip as he seems to consider his next words, “I wonder if She hasn't also tried to make it up to you.”

“Make it up to me?” he huffs, incredulous, unable to quite mask the sharp flare of disappointment that tinges his words. 

Gingerly but deliberately, he pulls his hand out of Aziraphale’s grasp. Plants both hands palms down on the bedding instead and pushes himself slowly, laboriously into a sitting position, past the stiffness and the trembling protest of his too weak muscles. Scoots flush against the backrest, putting distance between them. He ignores the crestfallen, worried expression on the angel’s face, the way his now empty hand hovers in the air in timid, pleading hope before falling, limp and dejected, back in the angel’s lap.

“How, _exactly_, did she try to make it up to me, then, angel? Hmm? Was it when She decided to give me back the ethereal form She Herself had burned away millennia ago just so She could throw the same archangel into Hell the second time? When She left me there to be tortured for all eternity? Delivered me to Lucifer like a celestial fucking goose on a platter? ‘Hey, Luci, remember your baby brother Raphael? Well, guess what, the demon Crowley that betrayed you? That was him. Surprise, surprise. Here you go, have at him!”

The angel flinches at the increasingly sharp tone, blue eyes filming over with anguished tears, and Crowley deflates just like that. He lets out a heavy sigh, his shoulders dropping under the sudden weight of bone-deep exhaustion. “I’m sorry, angel,” he murmurs, words muffled by his palm as he runs a weary hand down his face. “Don’t mind–”

“I heard you.”

“Hmm?”

“You called my name.” Those tear-washed eyes are watching him sorrowfully from across the bed, haunted by a memory Crowley’s not privy to. “It had been weeks after you… after….” Aziraphale falters, breath hitching on a ragged, strangled sob that has Crowley reaching back for the angel’s hand. Aziraphale grips it, clings to it – a drowning man to a straw. “I wasn’t dealing well,” he admits, lower lip trembling. “I thought I’d lost you and I… But then I heard you. Calling for me, calling my name.”

Crowley blinks.

He had called out to Aziraphale, sure. More than once during the endless torture his thoughts had wondered to his angel – his mind’s pitiful attempts to escape the pain. Perhaps there were moments when he had even made his calls out loud. But…

“You… _heard _me?”

Aziraphale nods, eyes wet and wide and earnest and blue-blue-blue.

“And you think She…” His throat is too dry all of a sudden, the words snagging, unable to get past.

The smile returns to Aziraphale’s face, a small, tremulous thing. “I do believe She did, my dear.” He nods again, pulls Crowley’s hand closer, pressing it against his chest with such anxious fervor as if it were one of his most treasured books that he was trying to keep away from a particularly persistent customer. Despite himself, despite the painfully raw subject, Crowley finds the mental comparison endearingly soothing. “I can’t imagine your words would have reached me otherwise.”

Crowley frowns, tearing his gaze away from the hopeful intensity of the angel’s stare. Looks at his hand instead, trapped within Aziraphale’s grasp. Focuses on the feel of the angel’s chest against the skin of his palm, rising and falling with every breath. Tries to match his own suddenly erratic heartbeat to the much steadier rhythm at his fingertips. Could it be true, he wonders. Could She have carried his voice to Aziraphale, made it reach him from within the very bowels of Hell? And if She did… _why?_ After all this time, after all the silence, the pain…. Why?

“There is… something else, too.”

There’s another falter in Aziraphale’s voice, the tiniest of stutters that speaks of nervousness, of reluctance to go on. It, more than anything, draws Crowley’s attention back to the angel’s face, and he squints, brow furrowing, as he scrutinizes his suddenly flustered companion. 

“Something else?”

Aziraphale’s mouth opens as if to speak, then closes abruptly, lips twitching into an anxious, discomfited not-quite-smile. 

“Angel?”

The hands holding Crowley’s hostage tremble, seeming startled by his gentle prod. Tighten further as though afraid that he would pull away again. “Right, well.... You see, uhm… Well, I’m not quite sure if it was your doing or….” A single finger separates from the tight clasp around Crowley’s hand and twitches upward as Aziraphale sneaks an emphatic glance toward the ceiling. “…or Hers, but… well…”

“You’re rambling, angel.” Crowley places his free hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder, kneads his fingers lightly into the string-taut muscles, releasing a small pulse of calm. “Relax.”

Aziraphale reacts to the suggestion with a full-body sag, his eyes closing briefly as he takes in a deep fortifying breath. “Forgive me,” he murmurs, looking at Crowley once more, his smile more certain this time, more… alive. “It’s all been a bit… overwhelming.”

Crowley huffs at that, rolling his eyes with commiserating understanding. “Which part? Your demon partner coming back as an angel? Or you going up against one of your former bosses? Which, by the way, was an extremely stupid, reckless thing to do, angel, and we should really–”

“Remembering you,” Aziraphale interrupts the chastising flow of his words, and Crowley quiets, stunned into momentary, confused silence.

But there’s something about the way Aziraphale said these words, something about the too-knowing, sorrowful intensity of the gaze that bores into Crowley’s that dissipates the confusion, leaving in its place an unsettling feeling of unease.

“I haven’t been gone that long for you to have forgotten me already, angel, have I?” He tries, mouth twitching into an unsure, lopsided smile.

But the joke falls flat and Crowley tenses despite himself when the angel detaches one hand from the death grip he has on Crowley’s and reaches, slowly, as if afraid to spook a wild animal, to cup the side of his face.

“I knew you,” the angel whispers, and Crowley feels his breath stutter in his corporation’s lungs with the very next softly spoken, “from Before.”

“Y-you… wh… ngk….” And then his breath cuts out altogether, as the angel’s fingers move, gently, reverently tracing a path along his cheekbone. 

“I’d forgotten.” The fingertips flutter against Crowley’s cheek, feebly, like the wings of a butterfly. “I think we all have, after the Fall. So many were lost that day and we didn’t… didn’t remember anything about them.” The angel smiles, wistful. Raises his hand higher to weave his fingers lightly, almost weightlessly through the tangled mess of Crowley’s locks. “I _tried_ to remember when I brought you back, now that I knew your name, but… it was as though there was some sort of a… a block on my memory. I couldn’t. Only flashes, bits of colors and sounds and….”

“M-makes sense,” Crowley manages to rasp out, frozen still by the soothing, feather-soft movements. “So many angels Fell That Day, so many bonds were broken… Guess, She figured it would be easier to just let you all forget who you lost. I mean,” he shrugs, trying for nonchalant, “even those of us who Fell… _most_ of us,” he amends as an afterthought, “have done our best to forget the Before.”

He didn’t. Could never make himself forget. He wishes he did. Wishes he were like the other demons, those who were able to cut themselves off from their pre-Fall lives so completely that nothing was able to filter through. But he had been a silly, naïve little angel who kept hoping until the last moment that their Mother would see reason, would put an end to that horrific, unnecessary bloodshed and call off the unimaginably cruel punishment for those who dared to stray. It was a foolish hope he’d clung to even as he was shoved unceremoniously down from the Heaven along with the rest of the dissenters, even as his wings began to burn, even as…. 

Maybe he never quite managed to let it go altogether. Maybe that’s why those memories never quite released him either, no matter how hard he tried to block them, too. Maybe it was Her way of further punishing a foolish demon for daring to expect compassion from Her.

“They started coming back, the memories.” Aziraphale’s voice cuts through the grim veil of his thoughts, blue eyes watching him with the same awed intensity. “After you did… whatever you did to Michael, the memories started coming back. Not right away, not all at once, but…,” the angel smiles again, shy and fond, “I remember now. You, the others, the way things were Before…. Everything.”

Crowley blinks at him, blinks again. “M-Michael, she… There was a darkness within her…,” he murmurs dazedly, his mind reeling. “…A… a hatred. I saw it That Day on the battlefield, too. Wasn’t just her, either. I could see traces of it everywhere around me, growing, tainting everyone it touched…. I didn’t know what it was back then, didn’t know the name for it yet.” He chuckles, humorless, adds with self-deprecating bitterness, “I guess becoming a demon remedied that particular knowledge gap pretty quickly.”

Aziraphale’s face crumples, his chest shuddering under Crowley’s hand as he breathes out a sorrow-filled, regretful, “Oh, darling…”

“Ngk… s’fine. Was a long time ago.” He coughs in an attempt to clear his uncomfortably dry throat. Looks away from those too-blue eyes, forcing his lips into a sour facsimile of a smile. “I…uh… I wanted to fix it then. Was my job – healer and all. But there were already so many wounded, so much pain… I was… I was tired, I needed help. _Her _help. But She never….”

“So that’s what you did now,” Aziraphale supplies, hand pressed firm against his cheek – a warm, tangible anchor, “with Michael. You fixed it, fixed _her._”

“Healed,” Crowley dips his head, amends slightly, “At least I tried to. But you….” He searches the angel’s eyes, trying to ascertain the truth in the earnest cerulean depths and fearing it at the same time. “You remember?” He swallows tightly at Aziraphale’s nod of confirmation, forcing out a choked, brittle, “But I don’t… I didn’t… h-how?”

Aziraphale’s fingers resume their comforting rhythm, the gentlest hint of soothing power seeping through under Crowley’s skin. He leans into it like a cat into a touch, closes his eyes against the calming caress.

“You said earlier that healing a damage takes a lot more power than causing it,” the angel ventures, half-statement, half-question. “Perhaps when you threw all that power into healing Michael’s soul, you–”

“Accidentally removed the barrier that the Almighty Herself put in place?” Crowley can’t help the tinge of sarcasm that stains his words.

The angel does not seem discouraged by his obvious skepticism. “Well, Her ways _are_ ineffable, my dear boy,” he begins with a shrug and a smile. “Perhaps…”

A distant crackle of power interrupts whatever else he was about to say, and Crowley lurches out of the angel’s grasp and off the bed, even as the bedroom door is pushed open and Anathema’s bespectacled boyfriend pokes his wide-eyed, pale face into the crack with a nervous, “Um… sorry to interrupt, but there’s… we’ve got visitors.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, so there you have it...some of the loose ends coming together (hopefully. Or maybe I just made things even more confusing, I don't know.
> 
> Let me know in the comments. Help me kick that muse into gear :*


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14 – epilogue

He doesn’t know what he was expecting to see when he shuffles out onto the porch, one arm slung over Aziraphale’s shoulders, the angel bearing more and more of his weight as exhaustion from the short trek is sapping what little strength he has. An enormous undulating sea of ethereal and occult beings mixed impossibly together and crowding the decidedly too small garden in front of the Jasmine Cottage is certainly not it.

“…The hell…?”

He drops his arm from Aziraphale’s shoulders, pushes himself forward on unsteady legs, placing himself between the angel and the motley mass of faces before him. There are too many of them, from both Heaven and Hell, and if they decide to attack, Crowley, alone and weak as he is, won’t stand a chance against them. But it doesn’t matter. He won’t let them get Aziraphale. Not as long as he’s still standing.

“What do you want?” he growls, but his attempt at sounding intimidating fails spectacularly as he wobbles on weakened knees and the angel steps in beside him, gently but firmly pushing aside Crowley’s protectively splayed out arm to wrap his own securely around Crowley’s waist.

“We’re not here to fight.” A dark figure separates itself from the endless sea of faces, and Crowley tenses as it steps toward them, a swarm of flies buzzing around its disheveled dark-haired head.

“No?” he challenges, straightening as much as Aziraphale’s hold and his own still recovering body allow him.

“May…” Aziraphale places his other hand on Crowley’s chest in a not so subtle show of protection and supportive restraint as he addresses the Prince of Hell. “…May we inquire as to the reason for all of you being here?”

Beelzebub doesn’t even glance his way, their attention drawn solely to Crowley. “Thingzzzz have been changing,” they say, an odd, probing look in the faded blue eyes. “Some of us are… remembering.”

“Remembering what?” Crowley murmurs, his mind snapping back to his earlier conversation with Aziraphale, as he lets his gaze roam over the kaleidoscope of anxious, eager faces. _This… it can’t be what they mean. … Can it?_

“You.”

His gaze snaps back to Beelzebub’s face, wide and searching. But there’s no malice in the Prince’s expression, no predatory hunger. Just a shadow of something cautiously curious and oddly hopeful.

“You healed me That Day.” The blue eyes narrow, bore into him with needy, urgent intensity. The words they speak come slow, dredged up out of the deep, abandoned well of millennia-old memories. “I was wounded… badly….”

A thin pale hand comes up to rest haltingly over the black-clad chest, tracing an invisible line across the ribbons that hang from the filigree brooch. And Crowley can’t help but follow that movement. Can’t hold back a soft gasp of an inhale at the memory of a pale chest rent apart with a celestial sword, of his own hand hovering over the torn, bleeding edges, the warm, insistent flow of his power forcibly pulling the wound closed. 

He had never even looked at that angel’s face. There were so many wounded, and he was already so tired – wrung dry from the healing and the pain of seeing so much suffering around him, the suffering he so desperately but, ultimately, unsuccessfully tried to ease. And then… then Michael was standing over him, demanding that he step aside and let that angel die, and… and he had simply run out of time.

Beelzebub? That had been Beelzebub?

Crowley blinks, forcibly tearing his gaze away from the phantom wound. Looks back up at the pale, snub-nosed face. 

“You healed me,” the Prince of Hell reiterates slowly, meeting his memory-clouded gaze with a troubled, incredulous one of their own, as if they can’t believe the words they’re saying. “And then you stood over me when Michael threatened to finish the job.”

“I…” His throat clicks, desert dry, tripping on the rest of the phrase. The arm around his waist tightens in a silent show of support, and he relaxes minutely, swallowing past the arid walls of his throat.

And freezes again as a new voice speaks out from among the dappled crowd of beings ethereal and occult. Followed by another, and another, and another.

“You healed me, too.”

“And me.”

“And me.”

An angel with piercing blue eyes and a long mane of amber-gold hair smiles shyly up at him when Crowley's wide-eyed, wandering gaze stumbles upon him. “You taught me how to repair a broken wing,” he says, and Crowley’s mind turns over, the memory of a name floating up to the surface. _Zerachiel_, a healer angel, young and eager, so, so eager. Crowley had been entrusted to teach him back when… back when….

“You and I built a nebula together,” a soft, unsure voice calls his attention to a dark-skinned angel whose face is splattered with bits of golden stardust. And his heart twinges at the timid, apologetic look in the almond-shaped eyes. _Uriel_. His baby sister, the one that tagged along with him to watch him create the stars. 

And that nebula – he remembers it, remembers it, oh, so well. Remembers Uriel’s laughter, her dark eyes dancing with excitement as she floated among the swirling, fairy veils of purple, white and blue, helping him illuminate the brightly colored clouds of gas and dust with spinning, fiery balls of stars.

He sucks in a sharp breath, his heart beating faster and faster as memories swirl inside his mind, mirroring in the thousands watchful eyes looking back at him. It’s all too much all of a sudden – those memories, those faces, so rapt, so hopeful, so awed. He squeezes his eyes shut against them, shakes his head as if trying to chase them all away. 

“Why?” he rasps. _Why is this happening? Why now? What are You trying to prove? _

“Why are you all here?” _What do you want?_

“You were calling on us to stop fighting That Day,” another voice responds, gruff and familiar and close, too close, if he’s to judge by the way Aziraphale stiffens beside him.

He reaches up blindly, places his hand over Aziraphale’s where it’s resting on his chest. Interlocks his trembling fingers with the angel’s, and only then does he open his eyes to meet his sibling’s violet gaze. There’s none of the menace in it now, none of the cold he remembers with spine-chilling vividness from the day of Aziraphale’s would-be execution. Like with all the others, the look in Gabriel’s eyes is a strange mixture of lost and found.

“I was,” Crowley confirms, tightening his grip on Aziraphale’s hand. “No one…,” he stumbles, breath stuttering in his corporation’s lungs, “…no one listened.”

Gabriel nods curtly, throws a sharp glance at Beelzebub who responds with a slow, encouraging blink. 

“We are ready to listen now,” Gabriel says, and the conviction in his voice and face leave no doubt as to the sincerity of his words.

A quick survey of the mass of faces crammed inside the verdant boundaries of the garden tells him that sentiment is shared by all.

“It won’t be easy,” Gabriel speaks again, his normally smooth, well-groomed face creased with apprehension of one unsure of the success of the task that lies before him, “but we have already begun negotiations and we intend to see them through.”

“Negotiations?” he echoes, feeling more than a little faint. Beside him Aziraphale shifts to allow him to lean more into his steady support, and he takes him up on the offer, taking more weight off his trembling legs to sag slightly into the angel’s side.

“A temporary… truce,” Beelzebub edges in, cringing slightly at the last word as though finding it unpleasant. And for a demon Prince working off millennia-worth of hatred for the other side, it most likely is. “We don’t know what it will lead to, but we are… talking. As you can see,” they sweep their hand out to indicate the mass of black and white behind them. “No slit throats. Nobody’s even bleeding yet.”

“Indeed,” Gabriel concurs with a grimace of distaste, “we’ve made some progress.” He falters suddenly, looking uncomfortable. “We’ve also been trying to talk to… to Her.” He raises his eyes briefly up to the sky, before turning an uncharacteristically abashed, pleading gaze to Crowley. “We’ve been asking Her to guide us, to show us a sign, but… She won’t respond to us. And we were hoping that maybe you could… well… speak to Her on our behalf, as it were. Since you’ve been, you know…” Gabriel gestures toward him, his hand making some complicated wave-like motion that seems to trace a vague outline of Crowley’s body.

“Since I’ve been what?”

“Forgiven.” It is Beelzebub who answers, pale, washed-out eyes boring into Crowley with awed, needy hunger.

Crowley, for his part, feels as though he’d just been run over by a train. Twice.

“Forgiven?” The word is choked out of him, raw and brittle and gratingly sharp. Because it doesn’t make sense. Because how could he be? Even if his questions were not what damned him, his failure That Day to bring his brothers and sisters back from the brink, to heal the damage on both the physical and the ethereal plane surely was. A failure that was sealed by Her reproachful silence, sentenced with a Fall, and punished for all of the millennia since by Her mute contempt. 

Whatever else he may have believed about the unexpected resurgence of his angelic essence (and the subsequent weeks of torture at the hands of his former colleagues), Her forgiveness was certainly not it. She wouldn’t. Not after all this. Why would She?

“Darling, if I may…” One arm still wrapped bracingly around Crowley’s waist, Aziraphale moves to stand in front of him, blocking his view of the angels and demons alike. Carefully he disentangles his other hand from Crowley’s death grip. Raises it to cradle the side of his face, drawing Crowley’s face down closer to his own.

“You said before that it was your job to fix things.” Aziraphale’s voice is low, gentle – a soothing timbre that breaks through the whirling cacophony of thoughts, grounding him, anchoring him to the blue-blue eyes that look back at him with so much open admiration and sympathy and _love_ that he feels both hopelessly breathless and like he’s able to take his first real breath in a long time. “And I believe you were right. If anyone was ever going to heal the rift between the angels, the Fallen and the Unfallen, it was going to be you – Raphael, Her _Healer_.” 

Crowley shakes his head as much as Aziraphale’s hand allows him. Opens his mouth to object. But the angel’s thumb slides down to rest against his lips, and the words of protest catch in his throat, fizzing out on a gasp of an inhale.

“You are, my dear.” The corners of the angel’s lips turn up into a soft, affectionate smile, the stubborn, determined look in the crystalline blues daring him to disagree. “You were then, you are now, and you always have been. The Raphael that I remember loved all Her creations as if they were a part of him. And the Crowley that I know loves this Earth and its humans just as fiercely.”

Crowley closes his eyes again, breathes, as slow and as deep as he can manage. He couldn’t speak right now even if he wanted to, couldn’t force the words past the tear-swollen throat. He lets the angel’s words wash over him instead. Allows himself to lean into the unwavering certainty of them as much as into his comforting, steady touch.

“I cannot pretend to understand Her plan,” Aziraphale admits, sounding more rueful, apologetic. “I don’t know why She chose to make you Fall. But I’d like to think that it was because She needed you to. Needed you to release Her newest creations into the world with a freedom of choice She Herself could not provide them. Needed you to remain here on Earth to watch over these new creations, to challenge them, to tempt them, to guide them. Needed you, finally, to convince one hapless angel help save that new world from destruction. And now, I think, She needs you to finish what you’ve started on that battlefield all those millennia ago.”

Aziraphale’s hand shifts, fingers ghosting over Crowley’s closed eyelids in a gentle nudge for them to open. Crowley obeys, albeit reluctantly. Meets the angel’s eyes for the briefest of seconds before dropping his gaze back to the floor.

“I don’t know if I…,” he starts, a raspy, breathless admission, “I don’t think I can.”

Aziraphale’s fingers caress the side of his face, slide down to rest below his chin, holding firm but without pressure. The angel waits like that until Crowley lifts his gaze to him again, smiles, soft and blinding. “Nonsense, darling,” he insists with a kind of confidence that makes Crowley’s knees go all weak. “_She_ wouldn’t have given you back this form and these powers if She believed otherwise.”

Aziraphale looks away before Crowley has a chance to respond. Turns to their sizeable audience, shoulders squared and head raised high. “Thank you all very much for coming,” he says, his smile turning just a tad wider and a tad more forced, like the one Crowley’s seen him give his customers when he was politely ushering them out the door. “I think what you have accomplished so far is already unprecedented, and I am sure that Our Mother will be delighted to see this…,” he gestures at the silent, watchful conglomerate of angels and demons, “_reconciliation_ evolve even further. And I am also quite certain that Crowley will be more than happy to speak to Her on your behalf. _After _he’s had a chance to properly recover from his ordeal.” 

A murmur of voices greets his pronouncement, a low grumble of disagreement and discontent. Aziraphale raises his hand to forestall it going any further. “You know what he’s been through,” he reminds them, directing a less than jovial glare toward Beelzebub. “And you know he had to confront an archangel so soon after.” He throws a pointed glance at Gabriel, brow furrowed in challenge. And repeats with the kind of calmly threatening, unyielding edge that makes his former boss take back a step, purple eyes widening in dismay. “He needs proper rest, and the least you all owe him is to make sure he gets it.”

There’s a long beat of silence following his words; a silent exchange between Gabriel and Beelzebub. Finally, Gabriel nods, shifts his gaze to Crowley, looking uncharacteristically contrite. “The Principality is right, we should not have imposed on you so soon,” he acknowledges with a slight purse of his lips, and Crowley blinks at him, mouth open in dumbfounded shock as he tries to reconcile this Gabriel with the cold-eyed archangel who ordered that very same Principality to his death with a disdainful sneer. Gabriel shifts uncomfortably under his stare, forces an impossibly awkward and frighteningly friendly looking smile. “Rest well, brother, and … think about our… our appeal.”

Crowley forces himself to respond, numbly moves his head up and down. “I… I will,” he croaks.

Gabriel nods again in gratitude, waves at the beings behind him. “We will make sure no one disturbs you again.”

They all vanish in the next instant, and only Uriel lingers behind for a moment, smiles nervously at Crowley. “It’s good to have you back, brother,” she offers quietly, and then she, too, disappears in a quick burst of white.

“Well,” Aziraphale remarks on a long, heavy exhale, “that’s that.”

Crowley exhales, too. It comes out harsh and shaky, like a choked off sob. 

“Darling?”

He shakes his head, lidding his eyes from the angel’s instantly concerned stare. “S’fine,” he murmurs, “it’s fine, I just….” He sucks in another traitorously unsteady breath. Risks a glance at Aziraphale, giving him a wan, tremulous smile. “You just all sound so sure about… about me, and I…” He shrugs, rueful and helpless. “I don’t even know if She meant to do it, angel,” he voices the one fear that has hounded him since he woke up in Hell with his skin splattered with stardust and his wings bleached white. “What if it was all just a big accident, like my healing of Michael making everyone’s memories come back?” 

“I see.”

Aziraphale’s hand finds his cheek again, warm and gentle and grounding. Caresses the skin there, tracing along the brilliant starbright patterns that pepper it once again after having been burned away in Hellfire, dulled to muted, rust-colored flecks. Her light, Her touch. He remembers when She put them there – a playful swipe of an artist’s brush that sent golden droplets scattering across his skin. Remembers all too well when She took them away. He doesn’t understand why She gave them back. Doesn’t dare believe that She did so on purpose, that he is truly… forgiven.

“Do you know what was the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw you in Heaven for the first time? Before the War?”

Crowley frowns, flummoxed by the seeming non sequitur. Shakes his head.

Aziraphale smiles. “How beautiful you were.” His hand moves up, fingers tracing the curve of Crowley’s eyebrow, ghosting up the sharp edge of his forehead to card gently through the tangled mass of his hair. “There was this Light in you, in your skin, in your hair, in your eyes – I couldn’t help but be drawn to it.” The angel’s smile turns softer, blue eyes crinkle, adoring, fond. “And do you know what the first thing I thought was when you came up to talk to me on that wall in Eden?”

“Slithered up, you mean?” Crowley rolls his eyes, voice gruff with self-loathing.

“How beautiful you were,” Aziraphale asserts, chiding, and nods vigorously at Crowley’s skeptical look. “Your eyes, your hair, your smile – they drew me in even before I realized why. And I will forever blame myself for taking so long to recognize it.”

“Angel…”

“Your Light, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s hand moves to cup the back of his head, draws him down to rest Crowley’s forehead against his own. “It was always there, love, underneath,” he breathes against Crowley’s mouth, blue eyes boring into Crowley’s, deep, deep into the very core of him. “Always a part of you. She never took it away, it just got buried deeper.”

Crowley squeezes his eyes shut in a vain attempt to wall himself off from the words he so desperately wants to believe and is so wholly terrified of believing. Because, if he does, and he lets himself hope, and She smashes that hope down in the end, tosses him back to Hell where he belongs.… He… he doesn’t think he’d be able to survive it. Not again. Not after allowing hope into his heart once more.

“You can’t mean that, angel,” he exhales, tired and wary and strained. “She…”

“…is Ineffable?” the angel finishes for him, and Crowley can hear the smile in his voice, and when he risks opening his eyes again he sees that smile in the warm glimmer that dances in the blue depths. “We are all part of Her plan, darling. Her great, big, Ineffable Plan. You just have to trust that She knows what She’s doing.”

The angel pulls back slightly, cocks his head to the right, the skin around his eyes crinkling mischievously. “To quote a wise mortal I’ve read recently, ‘There _are_ no accidents… only some purpose that we haven’t yet understood’.”

Crowley huffs at that, allowing himself the tiniest of smiles. “You sure that was a mortal, angel? Sounds a bit like someone with the inside knowledge to me.” He grows serious then, the smile dropping. “And you believe that? That this is what Her plan is for me?” He tries to sound nonchalant, but there’s a tremor of hope in his voice that he can’t quite hide.

In response Aziraphale leans in, pressing a soft, lingering kiss on his trembling lips. Wraps his Grace and warmth around Crowley’s body like a tangible, impenetrable cocoon. “I do,” he whispers, fervent and sure, against his mouth, when he pulls away, leaving Crowley dizzy and breathless. “And tomorrow, after you’ve rested, you can ask Her yourself. Come on, dear,” he nudges him gently towards the cottage. “I can feel how exhausted you are. Let me get you back to bed.”

“Tomorrow,” Crowley murmurs, decided and determined and, for the first time in millennia, hopeful. And lets him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *The line Aziraphale quotes comes from Deepak Chopra's "The Return of Merlin".*
> 
> Well, nearly 3500 wds on what should have been a tiny epilogue, and we are FINALLY done! Bit of an open ending, but hopeful :)  
Thank you SO VERY MUCH to everyone who read and commented and left kudos! You, guys, have been an amazing (and patient) audience. Much love <3


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